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DEMOCRACY AND POETRY. 
THE POPULAR BALLAD. 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

Boston and New York 



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THE N. W. HARRIS LECTURES 
FOR 1911 



%\)t $♦ WBL Harris! Hectares 

were founded in 1906 through the generosity of Mr. 
Norman Wait Harris of Chicago, and are to be given 
annually. The purpose of the lecture foundation is, 
as expressed by the donor, "to stimulate scientific 
research of the highest type and to bring the results 
of such research before the students and friends of 
Northwestern University, and through them to the 
world. By the term l scientific research ' is meant 
scholarly investigation into any department of human 
thought or effort without limitation to research in the 
so-called natural sciences, but with a desire that such 
investigation should be extended to cover the whole 
field of human knowledge." 



DEMOCRACY AND 
POETRY 



BY 



FRANCIS B. GUMMERE 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 



\* 






COPYRIGHT, 191 1, BY FRANCIS B. GUMMERE 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published October iqii 



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PREFACE 

This particular sketch of the relations between 
democracy and poetry opens with a retrospect- 
ive view of the institution, and closes with a 
sort of prophecy about the art. In neither case 
is there the slightest pretence to completeness. 
Books and essays on democracy and the reac- 
tion abound ; it may be doubted, however, that 
they will bring any surprises, so far as princi- 
ples of government are concerned, to one who 
has read the proceedings of the various state 
conventions, notably in the case of Virginia, 
which decided upon the Constitution. Books 
and essays, again, abound on the state and 
the progress of poetry ; but no practical crisis 
in poetic affairs has brought the discussion 
to a crucial point. The very unpretending 
forecast which ends these lectures undertakes 
neither an inventory — the books of the na- 
tions lie open to every inquirer — nor yet the 
intensive problem, such as that question lately 



vi PREFACE 

put forth by "an ingenious writer" in regard 
to the likelihood that artistic and delicately 
adjusted relations of a group of words in prose 
shall be substituted for the melody and the 
metaphor once achieved in the now exhausted 
individual word of verse. Only a general con- 
clusion, for English poetry alone, has been 
essayed. 

F. B. G. 

3 September, 1911. 



CONTENTS 

I. DEMOCRACY 1 

II. REACTION 47 

III. WHITMAN AND TAINE 96 

IV. THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 149 
V. DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 210 

VI. ALMA POESIS 258 



DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

I 

DEMOCRACY 

The most prominent phase of recent his- 
tory is the long movement inspired by demo- 
cratic ideals. The most obvious feature of our 
modern life is a reaction, in thought at least, 
against that movement and a tendency to- 
wards unbelief in those ideals. Movement and 
reaction alike form a constant theme for essay- 
ists, historians, observers of social and political 
conditions, students of literature, even, and of 
the arts; and about the main fact all these 
writers are at one. For two centuries, however 
sundered by fortune and narrower drifts of 
opinion the thinkers and the dreamers of the 
world might seem to themselves, they were 
for the most part dreaming and thinking in 
the common terms of democracy. Looking at 
them in fair perspective, one sees now that in 



2 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

spite of much jeering and quarrelling back 
and forth in the ranks, they all kept step ; 
and that is the democratic virtue. They were 
neither outright optimists nor outright pes- 
simists; on their banner was inscribed "All 
for the best in the worst of worlds " ; and 
that is the democratic motto. They delighted 
in announcing new ideas, which are now so 
shop-worn that even doctor-dissertations will 
not heed them, but which then seemed to be 
Columbian discoveries. It was a timid and 
incipient democrat in literary criticism who 
began to break down the walls of national liter- 
ature and to treat poetry as a making of the 
citizen of the world. This was Morhof in Ger- 
many about 1682. It was another democrat in 
literary criticism w r ho first suggested that the 
nodding and napping of Homer might be 
stretched into the sleep of non-existence, and 
that what men took to be a poet was the 
Greek people itself — not themselves, but it- 
self — chanting its own deeds. This was Vico, 
the Italian, about 1700. 1 It was the democrat 

1 VicoVbook was published in 1725 ; but his ideas made 



DEMOCRACY 3 

of a somewhat later date who took charge of 
history, and kept throwing about that same 
notion of the people itself — not themselves 
— with a fine sense of innovation. It was a 
democrat in philosophy, in ethics, in religion, 
who put fresh life into the word " humanity," 
and once more lifted hands of benediction 
over the outcasts of the earth. If one should 
ask for a focus, so to speak, upon the clash of 
old and new in this particular, there is nothing 
better than the scene suggested by a letter of 
Horace Walpole telling how in 1766 he heard 
Wesley preach at Bath. To the rising demo- 
cratic sentiment of the day that great man, 
who knew so well how to revive the old com- 
munal sentiment, the vitality of religion in 
the social group, was preaching the acceptable 
year of the Lord, liberty to the captive, and 
the opening of the prison to them that were 
bound. But to the aristocrat's mind, Wesley 

little headway at first. It is interesting, by the way, to note 
Fielding, Journey from this World to the Next, chap, vin, 
asking Homer "whether he had really writ that poem in 
detached pieces, and sung it about as ballads all over 
Greece." 



4 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

" exalted his voice, and acted very ugly en- 
thusiasm" Indeed, the history of this word 
"enthusiasm," for some fifty years, tells the 
progress of democracy. It was not only satir- 
ists like Swift, in his Mechanical Operation 
of the Sjririt, who had hated this "fanatic 
strain or tincture of enthusiasm " ; all serious, 
balanced men disavowed it as a vice. " I was 
resolved," says Hume in 1738 about some 
pruning he had done upon his Treatise, " I 
was resolved not to be an enthusiast in phil- 
osophy while I was blaming other enthusi- 
asms"; and Shaftesbury had recommended 
"good humour " as "the best security against 
enthusiasm," — as if this were an infectious 
disease. Every democrat is an enthusiast, and 
so is every young poet ; but in those days 
both poetry and democracy, though the tide 
was turning, were at a low ebb. Enthusiasm, 
then as much as to say fanaticism and rant, 
the vice of vices to the mind of a good tory 
in religion and letters, became in a few de- 
cades the note of humanity and the sign of 
men who were really alive. Even Voltaire is 



DEMOCRACY 5 

an enthusiast, little as one is inclined to think 
of him as enlisted in the same ranks with 
Wesley; and the cold, stately, conservative 
Goethe must nevertheless be remembered as 
one who wrote to his old drawing-master 
words which ought to be carved on the portals 
of every school and college in the world: 
" Teaching does much, but enthusiasm does 
all," — Lelire that uiel, aber Aufmunterung 
that Alles. 

Thus from academic and professional quar- 
ters came, as all men know, the ideas which 
inspired the democratic movement in politics, 
and here again dreaming and thinking had to 
suffice several generations ; for faith in de- 
mocracy was fixed long before its practice 
was assured. Distrust of democracy, on the 
other hand, and unbelief in its mission, are 
growing more and more bold at a time when 
its political and social practice has triumphed 
far beyond the hopes cherished by those pious 
founders of two hundred years ago. Its phys- 
ical success is huge, and its credit never 
stood so high ; but faith, despite the youth- 



6 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

f ul Heine a very different matter, faith in the 
power of democracy to realize its own ideals, 
is waning ; and, as in the former case, as in 
every process of the sort in human affairs, one 
finds the leaders of the reactionary movement 
among the children of light. They had been 
wont to live in monarchy and think in demo- 
cracy ; now the formula is reversed. Poets are 
apt to be very sensitive to such changes of 
thought, and have always held a kind of ce- 
lestial commission to protest against the abuse 
of power, whether, in Sidney's fine phrase, 
they make "kings fear to be tyrants," or 
whether, as now, they cry out upon the ty- 
ranny of the mob. By this is not meant the 
use of poetry, however effective, in mere polit- 
ical function, like Dryden's satire, or the verse 
of the Anti-Jacobin, but the voice of poetry 
speaking from its high places and as an ora- 
cle. In the specific case we find poets voicing 
the earlier reaction which came close upon the 
days of The Terror, and also we find them 
beginning and leading the chorus of protest 
that sounds with such persistence and such 



DEMOCRACY 7 

volume to-day. It was the " fervent entreaty 
of friends/' and not his own judgment, which 
forced Lowell to blot from one of his serious 
poems a line which spoke of America as " the 
land of broken promise " ; while his sarcastic 
verses on the world's fair of 1876, actually 
printed in the Nation, called out an indignant 
cartoon from Nast, which in its turn was sup- 
pressed by " the fervent entreaty of friends." 
Emerson, too, always hopeful, always serene 
in his outlook, who gave democracy that opu- 
lent and audacious phrase, " God said, ' I am 
tired of Kings/ " nevertheless put into a 
single epigram the bitterest slur ever made 
upon this republic and her rule. Like com- 
ment came over the sea. Renan, turning his 
back upon orthodoxy, was even more violent 
against democratic faith. Everybody knows 
Tennyson's gloss upon his own early enthu- 
siasms for the federation of the world, his 
second Locksley Hall recanting all the here- 
sies of the earlier poem ; but it is worth noting 
that he had much else to recant. " Be 
proud," he had sung to England in his youth, 



8 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

praising the patriots of the American revolu- 
tion, — 

Be proud of those strong sons of thine, 
Who wrench'd their rights from thee. 

But the "old white-headed dreamer" tells 
England not to be proud or confident at all, 
while she submits to " the suffrage of the 
plow/' and watches "Demos . . . working 
its own doom." Even in Maud, his long pro- 
test against commercialism, Tennyson turns 
angrily upon his old democratic allies. He calls 
John Bright " a broad-brimmed hawker of 
holy things," sneers at reform, at dreams of 
peace, and cries out for a strong man, a leader, 
of whatever particular faith. 

Part of this reaction, to be sure, is common 
in every epoch, is individual, forty-year pay- 
ing its sarcastic respects to twenty, and is only 
the test of red blood. Whoever is not a mis- 
anthropist at forty, runs the cryptic phrase, 
has never loved his kind. But another part, a 
good part, of this reaction must be charged 
to distrust of the whole democratic movement, 
and must be set down as a capital sign of the 



DEMOCRACY 9 

times. The palinodes and anti-democratic 
poems composed by democratic poets would 
make a volume of great verse ; and the great- 
est of it, both in quality and in bulk, would 
belong to the reaction of a century ago. What 
is perhaps the finest ode in our language 
comes under this head. With the title of " Re- 
cantation" Coleridge printed what the world 
knows now as an " Ode to France" in the 
London Post of April 16, 1798; it is in any 
case the supreme poem of disillusion, set to 
mournful music of wind and wave, nobly aloof 
from the clamour of such partisan verse as 
fills the Anti-Jacohin of that time and from 
the bitterness and abuse and futility of far 
later dithyrambics in prose like Carlyle's 
Shooting Niagara. One almost feels a dis- 
comfort in reading it, as if it were a private 
letter, or the tear-blotted page in a diary; 
it makes one think of Stuart Mill's odd 
definition of poetry as a "soliloquy over- 
heard." Indeed, as in the case of Burke, 
it is not so much recanting on Coleridge's 
part as the withdrawal of faith from a move- 



10 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

ment which had heralded liberty and now 
proclaimed social disorder. Less personal, more 
representative, more direct, is the recanting 
of Goethe and Wordsworth. One brackets 
these two names with confidence, however 
vehemently each of the pair would have ob- 
jected to the process ; for both were revolu- 
tionary in youth, and both recanted, partly in 
noble numbers, — "Iphigenie," " Laodainia," 
— and partly in almost unreadable verse, the 
"Achilleis" here, and there the stupendous 
and egotistic toryism of the " Prelude," — not 
the purple patches, of course, but the remorse- 
less iambic wastes which make one think of 
Voltaire's way of accounting for Sir Isaac 
Newton's book on Isaiah as " a consolation to 
the world for his genius." Most significant 
was that return of the two poets from poetry 
of the people to poetry of the schools, to the 
classics ; accepting classical standards as final 
is rejecting progress, and progress is the key- 
word of democracy. There were, of course, 
notable differences. Goethe eschewed politics 
and admired Napoleon, while Wordsworth de- 



DEMOCRACY 11 

spised Napoleon, wrote political pamphlets, 
and could sonnetize a budget or a vote. It is 
true that Rousseau's democracy had main in- 
fluence in causing certain phases of the storm- 
and-thrust period ; but in these matters Rous- 
seau himself followed the English, and Goethe 
wrote explicitly in 1829 that Sterne, along 
with Goldsmith, did most for him in the im- 
portant moment of his development. It was 
the sentiment of humanity more than the 
doctrine of freedom and human rights that 
moved the young poet. But the main dif- 
ference is that while Wordsworth was far 
more heavily committed to the democratic 
movement and was far more violently es- 
tranged, the sage of Weimar held his de- 
mocracy in some fashion to the end ; for 
the obvious " Goetz," the more obvious 
"Werther," the less obvious folksongs and 
popular studies, all of the earlier period, are 
really less significant than the conception of 
Faust, which, in a large, undesigned way, is 
of the very democratic essence. In the finish- 
ing of this poem Goethe came back, as he 



12 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

says himself, to the ideals of his youth. Auf 
freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehen is the 
final aspiration ; the whole Faust spells pro- 
gress, free and forward activity; and this, as 
we shall observe again and again, is the very 
postulate of democracy. Memorable, too, is an 
often quoted remark to Eckermann. " When I 
was eighteen/' said the old poet, " Germany 
was eighteen, too, — and there was something 
to be done," — da liess sich noch etwas ma- 
chen. But as a matter of fact, times and men 
are always young together, save in some such 
exceptional case as is registered by de Musset, 
who rebels at the destiny which brought forth 
his generation in days of long and wasting 
war and out of a strained national vitality. 
Reactionary verse of youth is a contradiction 
of terms, and with de Musset it made only an 
eddy in the main current. 

The force of that early and brief reaction, 
which followed the days of the Terror, soon 
spent itself. It is true that one finds here and 
there a whole literary life devoted to reaction- 
ary prose and verse, such as the sturdy satire 



DEMOCRACY 13 

of Peacock in his delightful novels, in his 
famous essay, and even in his poems ; but 
these are the same eddies which bring the 
main current into better relief. The early re- 
canting poets were paid back in their own 
precious coin by Browning's " Lost Leader " ; 
and in the interval, close upon a century, be- 
tween the " Ode to France " and the second 
" Locksley Hall," democracy swept like a 
great rising tide over the world and lifted 
with it not only social and political reforms, 
but practically all the sciences and all the 
arts. Mill's little book on Representative 
Government, with its famous seventh chapter 
of confident remedy against such ills of de- 
mocracy as the author conceded to exist, 
marks the height of the tide. Then the seri- 
ous reaction set in ; and theoretic democracy 
may now be regarded as distinctly on its de- 
fensive lines. 1 Even Lord Morley, who can re- 

1 L. T. Hobhouse, Democracy and Reaction, 1905, is the 
best of the defensive books ; a review of it by Lord Morley 
will be found in his Miscellanies, vol. iv. A direct state- 
ment of the case against democracy is Miinsterberg's Ameri- 
can Traits, chap. V, but Mr. Bryce in his new edition of 



14 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

pel specific attacks with such ease, paints the 
future of his chosen cause in sober if not in 
gloomy colours. Mr. Bryce is hopeful about 
the future of this land; but more than once 
he warns his readers to regard sundry facts 
upon which his hopefulness is based as the re- 
sult not of our democracy so much as of our 
happy breed of men. And we shall see that 
in the wider reaches of democracy Mr. Bryce 
is by no means hopeful. 

What is it, now, that those poets, awak- 
ing with Tennyson from dreams of progress 
inspired by the revolution of 1830 and by agi- 
tation of the reform bill, awaking with Words- 
worth and Coleridge from wilder dreams in- 
spired by the earlier and greater revolution, 
awaking with Goethe from dreams of freedom 
and equality which had not turned to any re- 
volutionary nightmare, — what is it that they 
recant? What is it that the modern assailants 
of democracy attack and the champions of 
democracy try to explain away or to defend ? 

The American Commonwealth, n, 828, and all of chapter en, 
is very optimistic. 



DEMOCRACY 15 

The poets' faith had been no easily doffed 
and academic theory. Wordsworth was ready 
to join the revolutionary army in France. 
Tennyson went on his perilous mission to 
Spain. What stuff was it that weighed so upon 
their hearts as to cause the change of purpose 
and the defeat of hope ? There is a well- 
known cartoon representing the Duke of Nor- 
folk drinking his famous toast " to the health 
of our sovereign . . . the majesty of the 
people ! ' Wordsworth in that disastrous year 
of 1793 would have drunk the toast. A dec- 
ade later he is praying that England may be 
delivered, not from revolution and bloodshed, 
but from the too liberal government, — from 

... a venal band 
Who are to judge of dangers, which they fear, 
And honour, which they do not understand. 

He has seen democracy in power, and he finds 
it criminal and incompetent. He recants the 
doctrine of the sovereignty of the people ; he 
gives up the hope of liberty, and all faith in its 
power to redeem mankind. That, too, is Ten- 
nyson's recanting mood. In dividual freedom, in 



16 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

a word, and sovereignty of the people, would 
be regarded by most of the assailants and most 
of the friends of democracy as forming in 
combination the central idea of the whole 
democratic movement. Philosophers, of course, 
put it differently. Mr. Hobhouse says that " the 
fundamental idea of the modern democratic 
movement is the application of ethical princi- 
ples to political relations." x He gives a bill of 
particulars, so to speak, and says that demo- 
cratic government stands for " personal liberty, 
the supremacy of law as against arbitrary rule, 
national rights, the wrongfulness of aggres- 
sion, racial and class equality " ; 2 but his whole 
book is a very mournful if persuasive summary 
of the proofs that representative modern men, 
men of action, except in the case of personal lib- 
erty, carefornone of these things. Nor does the 
modern man of action even try to understand 
them. Democracy that he accepts is personal 
liberty, not for everybody, but for the strong 

1 Work cited, pp. 138, 166. 

2 See Lord Morley's list of the various efforts to seize the 
central democratic idea, Misc., IV, 172. 



DEMOCRACY 17 

folk; democracy that he rejects is literal sove- 
reignty o£ the people. He knows that cause to 
have failed ; and he either neglects or forgets 
the central democratic idea, which I shall ven- 
ture, in spite of Lord Morley's warning, to set 
down as the active and supreme function of 
the imagined community. 

It is here that we can leave the highroad of 
commonplace, if not for fresh woodland ways, 
at least for paths free from that intoler- 
able dust of forensic and editorial traffic. The 
commonplace of distrust in democracy says 
that a long struggle for freedom won its goal 
and then passed over the mark into license and 
abuse of power, that a long struggle for sove- 
reignty of the people achieved success, and 
the people turned out to be a mob without 
self-control and prone to the tyranny of the 
demagogue. That is the theme of reactionary 
satire from Aristophanes to Tennyson. Su- 
preme function of the imagined community^ 
on the other hand, has never been satirized or 
recanted because it has never been the object 
or the watchword of democracy in action. It 



18 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

was, to be sure, a principle of the federalists. 
It dictated our national anthem. It is subau- 
dited in the best democratic literature, in aca- 
demic discussions. It is implied by Mr. Hob- 
house's phrase about the supremacy of law. It 
is praised by the strongest kind of praise, — 
regret for its absence, — in state-papers, al- 
though it gets scant heed from law-maker and 
citizens. The failure of democracy to enforce 
its own laws, which is another way of saying 
that it cannot set the community above the 
individual, has been mourned in a recent 
presidential message. Trials for murder, said 
President Taft, should be carried on solely to 
determine the guilt or the innocence of the 
accused, — that is, solely in the interests of 
* the community ; but nowadays these trials, 
though often perfectly clear in such an issue, 
are become mere " sporting propositions " be- 
tween friends of the murdered man and friends 
of the murderer, with odds, as cynicism might 
often add, upon the longer purse. The com- 
munity, all interests of the community, too 
often quite vanish from the case, and vanish, 



DEMOCRACY 19 

also, from other causes such as the breaking of 
a will, the granting of a divorce, the award of 
damages for injury due to reckless motorists, 
— " sporting propositions" one and all, with 
that august presence of the community hardly 
remembered by a phrase, and turned, for all 
practical purposes, into the shadow of a dream. 
Of course, this central democratic idea is still 
a part of the ritual ; but it is not thrust upon 
the citizen's notice or bandied about on work- 
days. The duty of every man to make the 
community efficient, to clear its paths, support 
it and submit to it, and keep it alive with his 
own life, is a kind of doxology sung wherever 
the name of the republic is mentioned in as- 
semblies of the people. It is an intermittent 
mood which one watches in its coming and 
going like the wave of joy which passes over 
the altruist's face whenever he thinks of some- 
thing that somebody else ought to do. It is 
an emotional outlet for the high moral sense 
in politics; and as an outlet it performs its 
duty to perfection. The dominant idea in what 
we are pleased to call triumphant and practi- 



20 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

cal democracy is something else. It is not duty, 
but privilege ; not service, but freedom ; the 
rights, as one says, of man. In brief, demo- 
cracy as a present and practical matter involves 
two principles, and in each of these the very 
opposite of the principle in question should 
be assumed. Individual freedom should be in- 
dividual service. Sovereignty of the actual 
people should be supreme and active power 
for an imagined community. The second of 
these propositions is a hard saying ; the first 
needs neither defence nor discussion, save in 
the matter of its literary connections, particu- 
larly in the poetic field ; and the two combined 
make adequate reason for refusal to approve 
the reaction against democracy. For this re- 
action is not directed against the democratic 
idea but against what people have mistaken 
for the democratic idea. Why has so gigantic 
a mistake prevailed ? It can be said that the 
whole miscarriage of democracy, not only in 
statecraft, but in philosophy, science, the arts, 
is mainly due, after allowing for the ubiquity 
of human error, to the influence of Rousseau. 



DEMOCRACY 21 

A fair quarry full of stones has been hurled 
at Jean-Jacques. The founder of cosmopoli- 
tan literature, he has had laid at his door 
all the sins that cosmopolitan literature com- 
mitted. As fruitful in projects, in new de- 
partures, as Defoe was before him, he has 
been judged guilty, like Defoe, but with far 
more virulent condemnation, of the unpardon- 
able sins of treachery, lying, and meanness. 
Yet a stout book could be written in his praise * 
and could be fortified by very solid facts. The 
malign nature of his influence consists not so 
much in what he did or tried to do as in the 
fact that his followers, and they have been 
legion, undertook to make a creed and build 
up a cult out of the results of his iconoclasm, 
out of his freedom for the individual and out 

1 For the literary account, and particularly for Rousseau's 
housecleaning in French literature, as well as for his serv- 
ices as founder of cosmopolitanism, see Texte's J. -J. Rous- 
seau et les Origines du Cosmopolitisme Litteraire, Paris, 1895, 
pp. 330 ff. and the final sentence : " S'il en est ainsi [that 
the French needs from time to time fructifying influence of 
the Germanic], personne assurdment n'a mieux merite' de la 
race gauloise que Jean-Jacques Rousseau." 



22 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

of his undefined sovereignty of the people. 
The constructive thought of democracy, begin- 
ning in England but getting its clearest ex- 
pression through Montesquieu in France, which 
had worked out the central idea of the su- 
preme function of the imagined community, 
of an ideal social order, intended that this 
idea should be applied everywhere, in the 
study of the universe, in the grasp of history, 
in the theory of art, and also, of course, in 
the practice of politics. But then came Rous- 
seau, and the deluge. The democratic move- 
ment was put to question not on the merits of 
its constructive idea, but on the results of its 
destructive work and on the failure of its ex- 
travagant promises. A reaction, justified on 
the latter count, is now thought to condemn 
most of the constructive work of the whole 
movement. There is abundant cause, I think, 
for a protest against this wholesale verdict ; 
while it must be granted that Rousseau's ideas 
of individual freedom and sovereignty of the 
people are suspect in politics and are quite 
condemned in science and the arts, it can be 



DEMOCRACY 23 

shown very clearly that the central and 
constructive idea has never been properly 
tested in politics and has been rejected in 
the wider field on weak and perverted evi- 
dence. Let us look at this matter a little more 
closely. 

The formula of individual freedom has been 
trusted to perilous extremes. The poet Whittier 
thought, precisely as Rousseau had thought, 
that if a man be set free he will be good, and 
that a good man will always be a good citizen. 
Truth, to be sure, makes men ideally free; 
but does freedom make men practically true ? 
This question might be put with profit to that 
most typical of all freemen, the tramp, whose 
ideal life would correspond in most respects 
to the ideal conditions demanded by Rousseau. 
All the explosive literature of freedom rel- 
egated service to the slave, and so, by its 
own programme, to non-existence; its main 
heroes, St. Preux, a sentimental prig, Werther, 
a sentimental spooney, and Carl Moor, a 
sentimental bandit, know nothing of service, 
nothing of obligations. Rousseau's ideal de- 



24 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

mocracy is described 1 in the life of those hill- 
folk of Valais about whom St. Preux tells 
Julie, — simple and tranquil people, " happy 
through lack of pain rather than through the 
taste of pleasure." The inhabitants of the 
Scilly Islands, by the account of Mr. Lang, 
sustain themselves by taking in one another's 
washing, but the Switzers were in better case; 
in their paradise one paid no bills and made 
no charges, — an ideal balance of the books. 
They know, explains St. Preux, that if they 
have money they will be poor ; just as if 
they have laws, and precepts, and obligations, 

1 Nouvelle Helo'ise,- in Works, Paris, 1793, i, 149. Texte 
points out not only that the Nouvelle Helo'ise is as dependent 
upon Clarissa Harlowe as Werther is upon the Helo'ise itself, 
but also that Rousseau's idea of the passions can be found in 
Pope, the sentimental tendency, as with Sterne, in individu- 
alism of the northern races, — best shown by Clarissa, — 
melancholy in Young and Gray, " tristesse du passe " in 
Ossian, and so forth. See Texte, pp. 254, 139, 337 ff., 355. 
But these " origins " of Rousseau count for little. Neither 
the Essay on Man nor even Clarissa Harlowe would ever 
have changed the working ideas of Europe, if one may so 
call them, in the least particular. Men listened to that 
music ; they marched to Rousseau's. 



DEMOCRACY 25 

they will be slaves. Absurd as the whole de- 
scription seems, it is Rousseau's invariable 
tone when he tries to be constructive in his 
democracy. All the members of that happy 
family in the second part of the Heldise are 
good because they are free. Law and govern- 
ment, moreover, are not really needed in tHe 
commonwealth ; for the Valais folk, so St. 
Preux pointed out, could live their life with- 
out authority on one hand and subservience 
on the other. " Children at rational age/' runs 
the report, " are the equals of their parents ; 
servants sit down at table with their masters ; 
the same liberty reigns in the house as in 
the republic, and the family is the image 
of the state." Laws, indeed, spirit or matter, 
were not Rousseau's affair ; and he puts 
an old jest very seriously when he says 
in his first discourse that bad as the Spaniards 
were in their colonization of America, a last 
spark of decency, an reste d'humanite, 
prompted them to forbid the colonies to all 
men of the law. Rousseau, in short, took the 
state to pieces, and then tried to put it to- 






26 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

gether with sympathy instead of law as its 
binding principle ; if he had been an Ameri- 
ican, he would have been the first signer of 
the Declaration of Independence, and the most 
persistent foe of the Constitution. Even the 
positive part of his Social Contract is quite 
futile. His passionate plea against the evils of 
society prevailed, but his plan for social good 
is a chimera ; for in politics as in life he was 
a picturesque tramp, and his reformed state is 
simply a tramp's paradise drawn to political 
scale. Freedom of the individual without any 
idea of individual service, and sovereignty of 
the people without popular subservience to an 
ideal but supreme social order, a constitution, 
the law, — that was Kousseau's way. 

With Montesquieu, on the other hand, indi- 
vidual liberty was " obedience to the law by 
equals," was " doing what we ought to will to 
do," was "the right of doing whatever the 
laws permit ; " while sovereignty of the people, 
by his reckoning, was desirable only where 
individuals put their power at the service of 
that ideal state, of that imagined or idealized 



DEMOCRACY 27 

community, which Rousseau could not even 
comprehend. Montesquieu, who remains, in 
spite of his English "sources," the founder of 
modern democracy, broke through all the forms 
of government to come at the substance ; and 
this substance, to use a verbal paradox appli- 
cable to other phases of the democratic idea, 
he found in the spirit of the laws. Make that 
spirit dominant, and the actual ruling of a 
country may be monarchical, republican, or 
even socialistic, without prejudice to its success. 
Nor did the pious founder leave this idea as 
a mere counsel of perfection. The "natural 
order " of the state was to be ascertained by 
a comparison of actual laws in all times and 
places ; and it was to be tested by the decisions 
of that supreme court of the world, as Schil- 
ler came to phrase the matter, which is called 
human history. To found democracy on free- 
dom is simply weighing anchor ; the spirit 
of the laws should serve as compass, history 
as the chart, while willing service of the com- 
munity by individual citizens ought to ensure 
a safe voyage so far as safety can be expected 



28 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

in a world where prudence and courage com- 
bined can be checked so often and baffled by 
mere chance. That was the central democratic 
idea ; and in its notion of liberty in self- 
restraint it was a new humanism, for the true 
democrat is the humanist pure and simple. In 
its passionate devotion to the imagined com- 
munity, to the ideal social order, it reached 
hands of concord to great visions and systems 
of the past. Something of the sort had been 
the dream of St. Augustine. Dante's vision 
was the vision of divine justice with which 
mortal wills were to conform; and it is signif- 
icant that we come upon the real democracy 
of Wordsworth and Coleridge, when, in 1798, 
they planned a poem on justice, or retribu- 
tion, of which only the prose fragment, called 
Wanderings of Cain, and an exquisite bit of 
verse, both by Coleridge, came to record. 
Now the easy, modern man who prefers such 
ideas of justice as are set forth in Victor 
Hugo's story of the good bishop converting a 
thief by paying compound interest on stolen 
goods, - — the man, that is, who has absorbed 



DEMOCRACY 29 

Rousseau's sentiment and calls it humanity, 

— sees discof d between the inexorable work- 
ing of law and that love which moves the stars. 
Democracy of the centre proclaimed their con- 
cord. 

The antithesis usually employed for the doc- 
trine of Montesquieu and the doctrine of Rous- 
seau takes a phrase from the Persian Letters, 

— with which in 1721 the eighteenth cen- 
tury may be said to have come of age, — 
takes the dominant note of all that Jean- 
Jacques ever said or implied, and declares that 
the former had in mind a democracy where 
each man could say " My Country/' while the 
latter saw democracy only when each man 
could say " My Self." Which of these two is 
democracy? It is handling perilous stuff ; but 
the task is not to be evaded, and the answer 
to this question means everything, not only 
for the political case, but for that inquiry 
about the past, the present, the future, of the 
art of poetry, on which I should like to throw 
the light of right thinking as well as of gen- 
uine facts. Does not the modern man both 



30 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

literally and figuratively say " my country " 
less often and " my self " more often than 
his forebears did ? Is it fact or fancy that 
we all live in an unholy dread of the com- 
monplace, and that we all live in an unholy 
dread of the democratic vision ? Modern 
reaction against democracy is bound to be 
centrifugal. Fame used to come to the man 
who could formulate an acceptable idea, — 
that is, make a commonplace current, — or 
could launch a great phrase. Now the lau- 
rels go to him who can launch a great para- 
dox. But to launch a paradox is to launch a 
wreck. Try a sentiment like "my country/' 
in whatever happy or sonorous phrase, before 
a drawing-room of clever people, or undertake 
to get it into currency in the press, in a book, 
on the stage; and note then what the man of 
" my self" will do with your sentiment when 
he has his turn, — and his name may be Shaw 
or Chesterton, or he may be the anonymous 
person who makes fun of clergymen and 
spring poets in the comic paper. In that extra- 
ordinary and very clever book lately brought 



DEMOCRACY 31 

into vogue through a characteristic sneer by- 
Mr. Shaw at the dull public which neglected 
it, The Way of All Flesh, some of the clever- 
est work and heaviest scoring is by way of an 
attack upon iEschylus, Sophocles, and Eurip- 
ides, as not only overpraised but well-nigh 
worthless word-mongers, upon Milton, whose 
Paradise Lost could be spared, says Butler, 
without a pang, and upon Shakespeare. If one 
asks for the exquisite reason, barring mere 
love of paradox, the answer is an eloquent 
shrug and a mutter about " commonplace." It 
is all very well to laugh at these covert attacks 
upon what criticism has allowed to be the 
classics ; the single spies have battalions be- 
hind them, and there is plain invasion not only 
of the drawing-room and the eccentric stage, 
but of the class-room, the reviews, the publish- 
ers' books. Now this war upon the common- 
place and this desecration of the classics 
might be defended as the working out of de- 
mocracy itself, of progress, were it not that 
progress in this case becomes mere glorification 
of self, that hoc volo which marks the ex- 



32 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

treme of Rousseau's perversions and of false 
democracy. Democracy is progress, but it keeps 
step, — keeps step, moreover, to the tried and 
traditional music of ideas. A defender of Mr. 
Shaw says that his is the genius of sanity and 
of strength, that he will one day rank with 
Goethe, and that his abuse of Shakespeare 
simply means that every age must have a lit- 
erature of its own. But Mr. Shaw has no mes- 
sage of progress; he simply tells us to break 
ranks, — to say nothing that has been said, 
and believe nothing that has been believed. 
The nineteenth-century reader was a good 
hypnotic subject, yielding almost in advance 
to the woven paces and the waving arms of 
classic verse ; he marked the great passages 
with an enthusiastic "good" or "true," and 
was suffered gladly to quote his favourites 
among friends. "As Milton says," or " as Ten- 
nyson has it," was once no signal to break up 
society. It even passed the editor's blue pen- 
cil. That is not the twentieth century's way ; 
and it is well to see what must happen if the 
great commonplaces are put under ban. For 



DEMOCRACY 33 

the commonplace, as its name implies, is the 
chief haunt of poetical convention ; it voices 
social feeling and the sympathy of common 
emotion. It absorbs the appreciation of count- 
less readers, and gives it out again in a fresh 
power of appeal : witness the English Bible, 
witness Shakespeare, saturated both with this 
great outpouring of communal sympathy for 
three hundred years. It is not only that you 
are reading the Duchess of Malfi ; it is that 
Charles Lamb is reading it over your shoulder. 
A power comes out of these classics, as we 
call them, which neither the genius of the in- 
dividual writer nor the judgment of the indi- 
vidual reader can explain. Literally the pro- 
cess is unthinkable; but it is true by the higher 
logic, and mere imitation, or suggestion, or as- 
sociation, will not account for it. Successive 
waves of sympathy pass from us into the 
work of genius and are given back by what 
we call, in high mood, the suffrages of time. 
A list of the great passages in the great 
poetry of the world would be a list of com- 
monplaces ; for the poet voices communal 



34 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

emotion, holds to convention, and tells of 
things as he sees them, inventing and pervert- 
ing nothing; for, as he says, — 

. . . S' io al vero son timido ainico, 

Temo di perder vita tra coloro 

Che questo tempo cbiameranno antico. 1 

Like the brave cock in Rostand's play, he re- 
cords the daily, the expected, the transcendent 
fact. Even what is called the grand style is 
commonplace. Eccentric diction, on the other 
hand, when it does not spring, as with 
Donne, out of a really great personality, is 
fairly sure to hide second or third quality in 
poetic art, just as eccentric characters in a tale 
are apt to hide exhausted invention. Shakes- 
peare, although anything but exhausted, tried 
something of the sort in Love's Labour 's Lost, 
his ambitious society play, where he copied 
quite as much as he satirized the "phan- 
tasimes" of the time; but he never tried it 
again, going back to commonplace talk and 
to very obvious characters, — Hamlet on life 
and death, Portia on- mercy, Prospero and Mac- 

1 Dante, Par., xvn, 118 f. 



DEMOCRACY 35 

beth on the lapse and futility o£ things in gen- 
eral. A reasoned list of the topics which Shake- 
speare's folk discuss would bring no surprises. 

O gentlemen, the time of life is short ! 
To spend that shortness basely were too long 
If life did ride upon a dial's point, 
Still ending at the arrival of an hour. 

Is there a nobler passage in English poetry 
than these words of Hotspur before his last 
fight, or a more time-worn iteration of com- 
monplace? The whole of our lyric, too, can be 
reduced to the conventional formula of ex- 
pressing man in terms of nature or nature in 
terms of man. Even John Donne holds to 
commonplace in emotion and thought if not 
in rhythm and phrase. 

In the long run eccentricity tires us, and its 
doom is sealed so soon as we know its formula 
of inverting the commonplace and proceeding 
as in multiplication ; but clever writers often 
succeed in keeping the formula out of sight. 
Thus Mr. Chesterton, who is so refreshing 
at his best, so apt in recovering lost or neg- 
lected points of view, is often lured by the 



36 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

mere mechanism of revolt, as when ridiculing 
ethnological studies as an aid to the history 
of mankind, he says that if you want to 
know why men in Timbuctoo wear red feath- 
ers, you should first find out why men in 
Bond Street wear black hats. But this is 
simply inverting the commonplace, in its 
turn an axiom of science, that the child is 
father of the man ; and a series of such inver- 
sions, known and expected, leads at last to 
the worst kind of commonplace, a sterile 
thing, the commonplace of the negative. " All 
that is bad in art," says M. Faguet, one of 
the soundest modern critics, " is anti-social." 
It is better to be a democrat, after all, and 
keep step in the ranks, than to set " my self ,3 
apart by defiance and negation. 

So much for that revolt against democratic 
emotion, which drives men from the common- 
place to paradox, and just now fills literature 
with " my self " in every dialect. What, however 
of the seemingly lost power to say " my coun- 
try?" How is it with the democratic vision, 
the imagined community ? Montesquieu had 



DEMOCRACY 37 

such faith in the vitality of his idea that the 
spirit of the laws was a palpable and liv- 
ing fact in his eyes, a force, almost an or- 
ganism. He called laws the nerves of the 
body politic. He believed in the life of the 
community. But Montesquieu was a French- 
man ; and the Anglo-Saxon is said to have 
no passion for ideas. There is a remark, 
credited by most of the raconteurs to Glad- 
stone, that the two things which an average 
Englishman hates most are the Pope of Rome 
and an abstract proposition. It may be doubted, 
however, if any soil of the world is so soaked 
in blood which was shed for ideas as the soil 
of England ; and something very close to an 
abstract proposition caused each of the two 
great wars waged in the new world. English- 
men and Americans have done their hardest 
and stubbornest fighting for ideas. It seems, 
therefore, that the idea of an active and su- 
preme community could be regarded as vital 
if it could be brought to stand alone and to 
make its own appeal, — could be seen, imag- 
ined, loved, and desired by the individual. 



38 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

In times of civic danger, both the old men 
and the young men have that dream of the 
state; yet republics are not only saved from 
death by visions, but are really dreamed into 
existence, and are so kept alive. The standing 
peril of democracies, — this is the well-known 
warning, — is not conquest by a foreign power, 
but their own lapse into an ochlocracy, into 
the rule of the mob. * Constant vision of the 
imagined community keeps this peril afar off, 
— such a vision, for instance, as Milton records 
in his Areopagitica ; and while that " noble 
and puissant nation" came to other conditions 
than the orator saw in his dream, who shall 
measure the effect of such dreaming upon the 
democratic destinies of England? Nor need 
the proof of this proposition be sought in 
rhetoric, or in the philosophy of the Platonic 
ideas ; the two most enduring systems in the 

1 Mr. Shaw, in the preface to his " Getting Married," 
quotes Voltaire that " Mr. Everybody is wiser than any- 
body," but shows clearly that Mr. Everybody's wisdom 
must lie in his choice of much wiser men to make laws and 
manage the state. And with this proposition Montesquieu 
would cordially agree. 



DEMOCRACY 39 

history of the world, one religious and social, 
the other legal and political, were built up by 
peoples essentially unlike except for their 
practical sense and for this particular power 
of vision, of abstraction, of civic imagination. 
Lowth long ago pointed out — in his thirteenth 
lecture — how vivid was the actual personal 
form of their country, of their very belief, 
their institutions, to the Hebrews ; their power 
to visualize an ideal community breaks out in 
phrase after phrase of prophet and psalmist 
and historian. Even to-day intense patriotism 
is the secret of this scattered and expatriate 
people ; and behind the constant play of pro- 
sopopoeia in their old poetry lies a habit of 
thought, building up by process of imagination 
that religion of Israel which has stood so firm 
against so many shocks of time. The very itera- 
tion and insistence of the type amaze a modern 
reader. One quotes almost at random — How 
doth the city sit solitary that was full of 
people, hoio is she become as a widow, she 
that was great among the nations and prin- 
cess among the provinces ! . . . She loeepeth 



40 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

sore in the night, and her tears are on her 
cheeks. . . . From the daughter of Zion all 
her beauty is departed. . . . Zion spreadeth 
forth her hands, and there is none to comfort 
her. The poet can hear her very voice. — Is it 
nothing to you, all ye that pass by ? Behold 
and see if there be any sorrow like unto 
my sorrow. . . . For these things I weep ; 
mine eye,mine eye rumieth down with water. 
. . , Even " the rampart and the wall ' : ' are 
heard to lament. Nor is it just the isolated 
word of the poet ; it was a national habit of 
mind, this personal and intimate vision of the 
commonwealth. Even the congregation, as it 
sang its hymn of praise or prayer, saw and 
felt itself as a single person, and the " I " of 
the Psalms must often be read as congrega- 
tional ; yet this fact is seldom appreciated at 
its value, and one neglects the procreative sig- 
nificance of such a habit of mind. It is the 
visionary power, as I said, which not only 
mourns, but saves, not only saves, but begets 
a republic. It was this intense vision that 
most moved the Puritan when he made the 



DEMOCRACY 41 

words of psalm and prophecy his own, that 
went near to making a republic in old Eng- 
land, and put a vigour into the communal 
life of New England which is still felt in the 
best traditions of the whole country. 

Between Hebrew and Roman there is dif- 
ference enough ; but Romans also saw the 
body politic as something alive, they felt 
the vitality of the laws, and they gave su- 
preme function to the community. From the 
beginning, Roman poetry found its main ob- 
ject in glorifying the state. Critics call it a kind 
of poetic debility when the Roman personifies 
his Patria, or makes Honor walk and Virtus 
speak. But is there anything so full-blooded 
as one of those warrior-words in its right 
place, ready for battle ? Symonds, in a strik- 
ing comparison of Greek and Latin poetry, tells 
how the flexibility and beauty of the Hellenic 
charmed his youth and very far outweighed the 
values of Roman verse. But as he grew older, 
and the shows of things meant less to him 
than the grim reality, he revised this judg- 
ment; and the instance which he gives by 



42 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

way of justification for his change of heart is 
the passage about Regulus in Horace's ode. 
Atqui sciebat. . . . Poetry this is indeed, and 
to the " iron string '" of it every heart must 
vibrate; but it is much more than poetry. It 
is Roman faith, loyalty to the great ideal, 
belief in the imagined community, that sort of 
fiction which is more real than fact. Goethe's 
fine appeal * for faith in these Roman tradi- 
tions should be taken well to heart. Suppose 
they are invented, he says. " If the Romans 
were great enough to imagine such things, we 
should at least be great enough to believe 
them." There is, to be sure, strong demo- 
cratic poetry of the Greeks ; patriotism and 
Athens make a good rhyme in thought; and 
Keats was right in saying of Hellenic singers 
that they left great verse unto a little clan ; 
but after all, Latin has spoken the demo- 
cratic words of empire, the enduring words. 2 

1 Eckermann, Gesprache, 15 October, 1825. 

2 The Marcellus episode in the Sixth Mneid^ of course, is 
the classic passage ; but there is very noble and quiet inter- 
pretation of the Roman vision in Horace's assurance of his 



DEMOCRACY 43 

The point is that Hebrew and Roman knew 
how to dream, how to see the civic vision. 
The community, made real by the dreams and 
imagination of its own members, is quite an- 
other thing from the public opinion which 
is so formidable until it has been reduced to 
individual terms, divided and parcelled out 
among one's neighbours. The " public" 
which Ben Jonson cursed when it damned 
his play, and against which Hazlitt rails in 
his essay on " Living to One's Self," the crowd 
which modern psychology is studying, the 
waves of popularity which rise so suddenly 
here in America about the energetic states- 
man or the military hero, and then ebb still 
more suddenly, leaving him drenched, shiv- 
ering, a mark for cheap wit, — that is not 
the ideal community, not the word of social 
order and justice, but the feverish coming and 
going of Rousseau's sentiment, a democratic 
bane. Far better was the old Puritan tyranny 

own fame as a poet; it will last as long as the state, — 
what more can be said ? — so long as the priest and the silent 
vestals go year by year up the steps of the Capitol : forever. 



44 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

of a theocratic rule held in place by communal 
opinion ; yet there is a more excellent way. 
The task of the American freeman is to see 
his ideal community steadily and whole, and 
to put its yoke upon his own neck. A man 
who had gone from a home where the old com- 
munal severity still ruled, to live in a frontier 
town where all men were doing as seemed 
good in their own eyes, complained of his irk- 
some freedom. " I don't want to be obliged 
to go to church/' he said plaintively, " but I 
want to live where people think I am obliged 
to go to church." He missed the communal 
ideal; he had found that liberty run to li- 
cense undoes the state and really disfranchises 
the citizen. 

The best thought of the eighteenth century 
worked out an idea of law and of justice, an 
equity of social order, and looked in hope for 
the triumph of true democracy. Militant de- 
mocracy, however, represented by France, 
took Rousseau's perverted idea of the state, 
got a phrase to express it, a song and tune to 
sing it, an army to back it, and tried to real- 



DEMOCRACY 45 

ize it in terms of actual government ; and 
France made the most gorgeous of all fail- 
ures recorded in the annals of man. We of 
the western world are proud to think that the 
great democratic attempt is prospering in this 
republic, and the Englishman points to his own 
constitutional development ; be that as it may, 
however, the collapse of the French revolu- 
tion sent the ideal of true democracy out of 
politics, in the narrowest sense, into what is 
called the great liberal movement. By peace- 
ful but heroic ways, for mainly humanitarian 
ends, and mainly by parliamentary . means, 
men tried again and for long years to realize 
the imagined community. In this sense, too, 
the sciences and the arts were all democratized. 
Now it is said in many quarters, whether by 
way of triumph, or by way of lamentation, 
that this effort also has failed. It has not 
failed. It has been checked ; but there should 
be no word of defeat. A closer study of the 
movement and of the reaction, keeping always 
in view their effect upon poetry, will prove 
that democrats of the old rock have no cause 



46 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

for dismay even with regard to the fortunes 
of the poetic art. Poetry shall not have it 
said that under all banners save her own 
men see the communal vision and idealize the 
state. 



II 

KEACTION 

The constructive democratic idea of free in- 
dividuals combining in service and allegiance 
to an imagined state, was developed by think- 
ing men of the eighteenth century, and was 
sufficiently tossed, as Bacon urges for all new 
ideas, upon the arguments of council. It has 
not been really tested, so far as its political 
and social fortunes are concerned, by the 
waves of experience; for the French Revolu- 
tion, at least in its actual course, was inspired 
by a very different aim. Praised and neglected, 
the central, constructive idea has not been 
kept uppermost in the great experiment of 
democracy, where momentary ideals are so 
welcome, but where the permanent ideal is 
so easily obscured. How has it fared, then, 
this central idea of the imagined community, 
in the far wider range of scientific research, in 
the philosophy of history, and in the theoretic 



48 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

treatment of literature and art ? Even here it 
has had no fair and final test of experience, 
although to ordinary sight it would seem that 
not a shred of theoretic democracy is left from 
the recent reactionary storm. But yesterday 
all the ships upon the seven seas of intellec- 
tual and even spiritual commerce flew the 
democratic flag and steered their course by 
a democratic compass. Democracy in its widest 
sense, both scientific and humanitarian, was 
the inspiring idea in treatises of various kinds 
down to the last decades of the nineteenth 
century. Then came the full sweep of reac- 
tion, opposed by no such material interests as 
kept and keep political democracy in power. 
In philosophy, in science, in history, in litera- 
ture, there has been a general recanting of 
the democratic idea. With plainer words, the 
assumption used to be made that in any his- 
torical event and in any " movement," as it 
was called, of thought, and even in any pro- 
cess of nature, the main impulse came from 
confederacy, whether of people or of natural 
forces. " Hidden forces" was a constant 



REACTION 49 

phrase. There were hundreds of special excep- 
tions; but this was the general theoretic tend- 
ency. Now, on the other hand, the tendency 
is to leave federations of all sorts out of the 
account and to explain every event or process 
as made up of an individual initiative and a 
collective imitation. Not actual politics, but 
science and history, have turned monarchical. 
We have seen how poets bore the burden of 
recanting in that temporary political reaction 
which followed the great democratic orgy and 
riot in France. But in this sweeping reaction- 
ary movement of modern days, although poets 
like Lowell and Tennyson made ample sign of 
political warning, the main burden of recanta- 
tion has fallen upon academic ranks, and the 
tragic sight of sights is the recanting scholar. 
Here has been fine revolution. Who shall 
measure the amount of painfully acquired 
learning, most of it made in Germany some 
forty years since, which has gone up in the 
flames of many a study-fire? What is left, for 
example, of all the lore accumulated about the 
original Germanic freeman, that paragon of 



50 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

democracy, of whom one read in Freytag's ro- 
mances, and of whom one heard in many a 
dingy auditorium of the seventies ? For effi- 
ciency, for craft, for the sterling virtues, and 
for a certain oppressive infallibility, those 
early Germans were described as unpeered in 
the annals of mankind. One was not quite 
sure how they held their lands, their houses 
were very unstable, and a kind of antecedent 
yearning for bier and skat, an amiable weak- 
ness, had to be conceded ; but they always 
went to town-meeting and carried their arms 
with them, ready for trouble, always sang a 
stave at the banquet, and showed in every 
way their unconquerable love of freedom. 
Freedom was the overword of the song. Waitz 
and Grimm in Germany, Freeman in Eng- 
land, all the brave old school of historians, 
could see nothing on that Germanic stage but 
a free folk rough and uncouth, unlovely even, 
yet carrying with them the precious seeds of 
democratic development, the jury-system, and 
the whole civilization of Europe. It was too 
much idealized, this sketch, too suggestive of 



REACTION 51 

Rousseau ; it hardly reflects the real demo- 
cratic idea ; but is it not preferable to the sub- 
stitute on which some modern historians in- 
sist, who can see on the same stage nothing 
but freebooters and hirelings ? The boats of 
the Saxon pirates did not carry a chaplain, 
and the invaders of Britain were no models 
of virtue ; but these Germanic founders must 
not be set down one and all as little better 
than paid bullies, turbulent nomads of con- 
fused origins and doubtful strain of blood, 
who, when they became settlers and English- 
men, turned, by some process not accurately 
described, into so many spiritless serfs. Of 
the two extreme views, this is the worse; and 
already a counter-reaction has brought back 
into favor a sane and reasoned version of the 
old democratic theory. For here is the di- 
lemma. Either the record of early Germanic 
poetry, which was once thought to reflect na- 
tional life, national virtues, national ideals, 
must be purged absolutely of all really Ger- 
manic suggestions, and the life, the virtues, 
the ideals, which it clearly portrays, must be 



52 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

referred altogether to Christianity and the im- 
ported remnants of classical culture ; or else 
this poetry, fragment though it be, must be 
allowed to contain the main original char- 
acteristics of the Germanic tribes. In the first 
case, not only would all the striking features 
of Germanic poetry itself be set down as imi- 
tation of the Latin, a theory now in high fa- 
vour but easily pushed too far, not only would 
any racial individuality be denied to these 
" Germans," another pet idea of the agnostics 
in ethnology, but explanations would be re- 
quired at every turn like the reply that was 
once made to some would-be eloquence of the 
present writer in his praise of Germanic loy- 
alty, the cardinal virtue of the race. The bond 
of the comitatus, which kept both leader 
and clansmen in mutual devotion until death, 
which made desertion on either side, so long as 
life was left in the other, the most dastardly of 
crimes, and held the warrior, even when escape 
was easy, by the side of his fallen chief, — this 
fierce but fervent and democratic pact was 
assigned as one of the reasons for the rapid 



REACTION 53 

conversion to Christianity of Germanic tribes. 
Christ died for his devoted band, his comita- 
ties; they died for him ; no creed could be so 
comprehensible, or so welcome. But, objected 
a student, why could not the comitatas be that 
very Christian doctrine brought to the Germans 
and expressed, verbally and practically, in their 
national terms? They had learned, that is, the 
lesson of Christian duty, of sacrifice, altru- 
ism. This would " explain" the comitatus 
as many another element in old German life 
and poetry has been explained; but, unfor- 
tunately for the case in point, assumptions 
of fact in this explanation can be controlled 
and refuted. Barring the evidence of Caesar, 
which antedates Christianity itself and is de- 
cisive against the explanation, all of our old 
poetry chants the comitatus with such sure 
note, with such ancestral confidence, as it were, 
that any assumption of alien and borrowed 
virtues goes by the board. Now this comitatus 
proves at least a part of the old democracy. 
True, a body of volunteers for the war, as 
Caesar describes them, cannot quite match our 



54 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

imagined community, although they seem 
ideal as portrayed in their best estate ; one 
must concede that hire and salary, enterprise 
that had a stomach in it, the promise, the 
gift, a kind of Wallenstein contract, kept 
the institution " going near the ground''; but 
the seeds of noblest democracy are in any pact 
whereby the freeman gives his free service to 
his lord in the common peril and for the com- 
mon good. The very word cyning, of course, 
is significant ; a chieftain stands for the com- 
munity of interests; and indeed a kind of 
imagined community is after all no far-fetched 
designation for this old democratic ideal of 
the Germans. It was a kindred democracy 
which pervaded all Germanic verse. The func- 
tion of poetry among these forefathers, as we 
first catch sight of them through the mists and 
on the skyline of history, is patriotic, in the 
communal sense, and mainly choral. Priests 
and soothsayers dealt also in verse; but what 
Miillenhoff calls mass-poetry outweighed the 
rest. In the wars and marches of the period 
of the wandering, however, minstrels came 



REACTION 55 

into view, singers to the chieftain or king, 
who kept the old note, but worked their art 
almost into artifice, chanting in elaborate 
rhythm and diction the glory of triumph and 
the tragedy of defeat. Now the one theme 
which most stirs the singer and heartens him 
to his fieriest verse is just this democratic 
pact, this loyalty of clan to chieftain and of 
chieftain to clan. Let the poets speak for it, 
— first, a poet who interprets conditions on 
the continent, with the folk of his story still 
heathen ; then the poet of Beowulf, with even 
older material; and last, the poet of a histor- 
ical battle-poem not far from the millennial 
year. Even in the diction and style of these 
poets, where, as in the second and third cases, 
actual poetry and not a transcript of it is be- 
fore us, we can see evidence of a robust and 
free national life, no mere barbarism ready to 
copy its neighbour's habit on any terms. A 
fairly thorough study 1 of the Anglo-Saxon 

1 Rankin, "A Study of the Kennings in Anglo-Saxon 
Poetry," Journal of English and Germanic Philology, viii, 
357 ff.; ix, 49 ff. — The Old-Norse kennings, though not 
uninfluenced, are nearer to heathen conditions. 



56 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

"kenning," that characteristic Germanic trope 
developed out of repeated phrase by process 
of variation, something like Hebrew parallel- 
ism, has lately been made with the object of 
showing how many of these particular ken- 
nings are imitated from Latin poetry. Thus 
the theological loan, as might be expected, 
covers a great deal of ground ; and even be- 
yond this huge domain, Anglo-Saxon poetry 
has borrowed many figurative terms that were 
once thought original. " God's candle," for 
the sun, may not have been Germanic. But 
not only is there a chance that some of the 
cases of borrowing may be referred to coin- 
cidence of mutually independent metaphors 
which are suggested at short range by very 
obvious conditions and events of our common 
life, not only is a respectable remnant of the 
kennings demonstrably native or national in 
origin — such as certain words for heart and 
breast, and kennings for the sea, like " swan- 
road," "whale-realm," " gannet's-bath," x — 

1 To mark these, in the present stage of knowledge, as 
Celtic, is not sportsmanlike treatment of the much enduring 
Germanic stock. 



REACTION 57 

but the kenning itself, like the system of verse 
with which it belongs, like the parallelisms in 
structure, remains a purely Germanic trait of 
poetry, common to all the languages of that 
group, and therefore older than any possible 
influences of the kind which must be conceded 
in particular cases. So, the ballad material, to 
take a more modern instance, comes from 
many sources ; but the ballad itself, as a liter- 
ary form, keeps its integrity in the face of all 
the attempts that have been made to put 
it into the long list of poetical imitations. 
Let us hear, however, these three poets and 
through them the Germanic warrior, freeman, 
clansman, — call him what one will. First is 
Saxo's famous transcript into Latin 1 of an 
" old Danish song." Two warriors, in desperate 
straits, exhort each other to endure. " Sweet 
it is," says one, "to repay the gifts received 
from our lord. . . . Let us do with brave 
hearts all things that in our cups we boasted. 
. . . Let us keep the vows we swore. . . ." 
This is surely as good, this oath, as the ibi- 

1 Elton's translation. 



58 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

mus, ibimus, that could seal the old democratic 
warrior-pact of the Romans. And Bjarki, the 
comrade, replies in more intimate, more pas- 
sionate loyalty : — "I will die overpowered 
near the head of my slain Captain, and at his 
feet thou shalt also slip on thy face in death, 
so that whoso scans the piled corpses may see 
in what wise we rate the gold our lord gave 
us! " This has the home ring, and needed to 
be imported neither from Jerusalem nor from 
Rome. The sense of free manhood keeping its 
word, fighting the good fight, rings out from 
a score of famous passages in oldest English 
verse; let clansman Wiglaf speak. 1 

"I remember the time, when mead we took, 
what promise we made to this prince of ours, 
in the banquet-hall, to our breaker-of-rings, 
for gear of combat to give him requital, 
for hard-sword and helmet, if hap should bring 
stress of this sort ! . . . 

Now the day is come 
that our noble master has need of the might 
of warriors stout. Let us stride along 
the hero to help while the heat is about him 
glowing and grim ! For God is my witness 

1 Beowulf 9 2633 ff ., with omissions. 



REACTION 59 

I am far more fain the fire should seize 

along with my lord these limbs of mine ! 

Unsuiting it seems our shields to bear 

homeward hence, save here we essay 

to fell the foe and defend the life 

of the Weders' lord. I wot 't were shame 

on the law of our land if alone the king 

out of Geatish warriors woe endured 

and sank in the struggle ! My sword and helmet, 

breastplate and board, for us both shall serve ! " 

Save the form of imprecation, not a shred of 
borrowed or imitated stuff is here; the "law 
of our land/' tribal custom developed into a 
national ideal, is no importation. This note is 
constant. The oldest bit of historical prose, 1 
as Sweet calls it, in any Germanic speech, re- 
cords similar devotion of clansmen ; and some 
three hundred years later than the composi- 
tion of Beowulf almost the very words of the 
poem are repeated, — even if they are imita- 
tion, the same spirit and a recurrence of the 
same facts inspire them, — by a poet who, it 
would seem, has watched with his own eyes 
English freemen waging a losing battle against 
the invader, has seen them scorn to follow the 

1 A. S. Chronicle, anno 755. 



60 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

cowards who fled when their lord fell, and 
now chants in no unworthy strain the brave 
warriors who fought out the fight and lay- 
dead about their leader on the field. It is at 
the critical moment ; and Aelf wine speaks : — 

" I will now my kinship make clear to all, 
that I was in Mercia of mighty race. 
My agdd father was Ealhelm named . . . 
None of the lords of my land shall taunt me 
I was fain from this field to flee away, 
my life to save now my lord lies dead, 
all hewn in combat, — my crudest grief : 
for he was my kinsman and captain both." 

Leofsunu is of the same mind, — 

" This if my hest that hence I flee not 
a footbreadth's space, but will farther go 
to revenge in fight my f riend-and-lord. 
Nor need at Sturmere steadfast thanes 
jeer and taunt that I journeyed home, 
when my liege had fallen, a lordless man." 

There is in each of these protestations some- 
thing of the solemnity of a formal oath; and 
later burlesques, as of the Frankish " gab/' 
only give deeper shade to the original. Is all 
this, then, mere literary copy of the Homeric 
battle-speeches, filtered through late Latin; 



REACTION 61 

or is it right Germanic stuff, as authentic as 
one of our old Indian war-songs ? No one 
can deny the great influence of Christian- 
Latin poetry upon the vernacular verse, or re- 
fuse to see imitation in the particular word 
or phrase; but an impartial study of all the 
German poems will, I think, prove the heart 
of them, the life of them, to be national 
through and through. The mania of explain- 
ing all words and all ideas as borrowed from 
somewhere else now goes to extremes as bad 
as the old notion that whenever two or more 
similar words were found in related dialects, 
they pointed to a common ancestral possession. 
To derive all Germanic ideals and expressions 
from the Latin is like making the red Indian 
of America get all his traits from the white 
men who drove him from his homes. Let us 
not despair of the Germanic freeman, not 
strike his name out of the ancestral rolls, nor 
lose this notable case of democracy in verse. 
His loyalty is native, and rings true; in its 
very pathos it seems a fair attempt to realize 
the imagined community. 



62 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

There is another loss, however, brought 
about by the reaction against democracy, 
which neither poet nor scholar is likely to re- 
deem. That older freeman whose looks and 
ways and speech were once so vividly de- 
scribed by the great scholars of Germany, that 
father and founder of our stock, the original 
Aryan democrat, is now stricken from the list. 
Comparative philology was a fair choice when 
it could conjure up those remote domestic 
idylls as euchanting and comprehensive as the 
dream of Faust. Here were glimpses into the 
seeds of time ! Scherer said that comparative 
philology had opened our clear gaze into the 
past "by thousands of years"; but the fog 
has closed again, and the vision itself has lost 
all credence. Where is the milkmaid now, the 
"daughter," and where are these fond parents 
plucking wool in the background — plucking; 
on one's life, not shearing! — and chanting 
genuine old- Aryan epic ? That fine and or- 
dered polity of the primitive Aryan has van- 
ished like a city of the clouds. Words no 
longer tell of things ; the past is now liter- 



REACTION 63 

ally a riddle of the painful earth, and one digs 
up the dust of old citadels and villages, and 
deciphers inscriptions, not to hear the roll of 
ancient song, but to spell out records of bar- 
gain and sale, or, at best, the capture of a 
province, sordid doings all. The Aryan has 
gone by the way of romance into oblivion ; 
and with him has gone most of his mythology. 
The myths themselves are still here and there ; 
but the combination which gave them to the 
imaginings and the daily talk of that old 
Aryan household has long since been dissolved. 
They belong as they come down in their love- 
lier guise, not to primitive religious instincts, 
but to the poets. 

Here was wholesome recanting. Moreover, 
one must recognize not only that democratic 
rubbish was swept away by the reaction, but 
also that sundry excellent furnishings were 
brought in, a profitable exchange. Standards 
of more exact criticism and more sober com- 
bination have been set up where once labels 
were pasted so recklessly on " period" and 
" race," — label is often libel, — - and where far 



64 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

too great liberty was taken with that bane of 
Mr. Saintsbury's peace of mind, the bird's-eye- 
view. Praise, again, is due to constructive ef- 
forts of the reaction. The closing nineteenth 
century set itself bravely to work retracting 
or explaining away the broken promises of its 
democratic prime. To cover its losses on the 
theoretic field, — its losses, for example, in 
the territory which comparative philology 
once tried to conquer and failed to hold, — it 
set the comparative method to work under far 
better auspices, and made two-fold conquest : 
it created the sciences of anthropology and 
ethnology, it created the science and history 
of religions. True, a dictionary is not as good 
reading as a romance ; but the dictionary is 
well made, and as a whole it will endure. 

This more cheerful outlook, however, is 
aside from the present purpose of balancing 
the accounts and summing up the losses of 
democracy. It is a far deeper, far wider sweep 
of reaction than appears to casual eyes, which 
has checked the democratic movement and 
set aside its ideals, involving vast changes 



REACTION 65 

in the reversal, — change of mood, change 
of method, comprehensive change in the re- 
sults. For example, in sociology, which Bage- 
hot put into such close relation of cause and 
effect with literature, invention now makes 
convention. The process has been reversed. 
Taine would have accounted for the general 
similarity in style of the leading articles in 
the newspapers, say in the Times of that 
period, by conditions of the people in mind, 
body and estate, by the environment, by the 
federation of influences working on each in- 
dividual and bringing him, unless he was an 
eccentric, into line with the spirit of that gen- 
eration. Such was the democratic way. Even 
Matthew Arnold gave the Zeitgeist first place 
in forming religious and ethical opinions. But 
Bagehot tells of somebody who asked the 
owner of the Times newspaper how it came 
about that all leading articles were so similar 
in style and spirit. And Mr. Walter, it will be 
remembered, replied genially that the case was 
very simple. " There is always a best contri- 
butor," he said, "and the rest copy." That is 



66 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

the monarchical way. It is so sensible, this 
theory, and applies unerringly to so many 
cases, that the temptation has been followed 
far, and all the social processes are now so 
explained. Instinct, that beautiful mystery, 
which M. Fabre x has so triumphantly vindi- 
cated for the animal world, is not allowed to 
apply to the human problems, which must be 
solved in their uttermost reach by triumphant 
common sense and by the doctrine of imita- 
tion. But it is one of the cheering and for- 
tifying facts of life that when common sense 
goes beyond a certain point, goes outside of 
its range, it ceases altogether to work and 
cannot be distinguished from idiocy. This re- 
ductio ad dbsardum can be followed in the 
argument for imitation as sole principle of 
social evolution without any regard to instinct 
or even to what one vaguely calls impulse. 
There is thus no communal progress, no in- 
stinctive, no sympathetic action; more than 
that, there is not even the impulse to balk 

1 Souvenirs Entomologiques, reviewed by the Revue des deux 
Mondes, December 15, 1910. 



REACTION 67 

and pull back when a leader goes too fast or 
too far. Inertia itself demands a leader, and 
dolce far niente has become one of the imi- 
tative arts ! And this, if it were true, would 
put democracy into very evil case. But it is 
absurd. 

With so violent a reversal of method in re- 
search, moreover, goes quite as obvious a 
reversal in the results and in the mood of 
research. Whatever one may think of de- 
mocracy, one cannot deny that at the very 
worst it believes itself to be making progress, 
and that it scatters about its path words of 
cheer and hope. Any transfer, then of signi- 
ficance from the people, the community, to the 
great man, however such a name as " leader " 
may mean conquest, progress, expectation, 
seldom results in advance on any but material 
lines ; in former days it made for increase of 
territory and military power, and in modern 
days it makes for startling inventions and im- 
provements in the arts of life. That kind of 
intensive progress is very familiar. But where 
now is human progress at large, progress of 



68 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

the ages, which Turgot proclaimed and which 
served as the most inspiring idea ever wel- 
comed by minds that yearned to get all know- 
ledge, of the future as of the past, within their 
ken? For even in great concerns of life, un- 
der these reactionary conditions, leaders do 
not really lead ; they go back and forth. A 
monarchical period of thought seldom breeds 
men who push forward, explore, conquer ; it 
breeds men who call back their forces, desert 
unsafe positions, contract, retrench, wait. 
And there is loss not only in the advance ; 
there is fine shrinkage in the record of old 
achievement. However vain the belief may 
seem to be, fact it is that without belief in a 
vital and supreme community which never 
dies, which carries on our work, which shall 
succeed where we fail and attain when we fall 
short, without belief in that full-blooded idea 
of our democratic forbears now with God, 
men lose not only the hope of progress for 
the future but the sense of progress in the 
past. In that great second discourse of Turgot, 
the young theologian prophesies on one page 



REACTION 69 

the independence o£ America and on the next 
tells how poetry had its spontaneous and so- 
cial origins in the days of primitive men. 1 He 
takes communal progress for granted; and 
history for him, despite the reactions, is in 
the long account a steady advance of civilization 
upon the retreating forces of barbarism. But 
history, even of more modern times, must not 
now be regarded from any such democratic 
point of view. It falls into a series of al- 
most disconnected scenes, each studied most 
accurately for itself and for the relations 
of its parts. You shall examine the setting 
of the scene, note every word and gesture of 
the actors, and value the combined effect by 
standard of proof ; but you shall not talk of 
the play and of its plot. Of course you shall 
commit no such solecism as a reference to some 
great purpose, whether of fate, of providence, 
of God, which sustained, let us say, Washing- 
ton and his army through that winter at Val- 
ley Forge. Nobody does that. But you shall 
assume no purpose whatever, — not even so 

1 (Euvres, Paris, 1808, n, 66 f . 



70 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

mild a hint as Renan gives in his account of 
the Hebrews carrying on their precarious pil- 
grimage the mighty destinies of monotheism. 
What you shall do, as some one did the other 
day, is to explain that Howe, a Whig general, 
might easily have crushed both Washington 
and the whole American revolution then and 
there ; but Howe wished the credit of such 
a triumph to grace a Whig administration, and 
he waited for the Tories to fall. That is history 
shorn of the democratic idea; it is a succes- 
sion of accidents and adjustments. So drifts 
into chaos and old night, like the sail torn 
away by a tempest, the steadying and cheer- 
ing idea of progress set forth by Turgot and 
Condorcet a century and a half since, and so 
eagerly absorbed into the thought of those 
and the following times. Progress, one says 
now, is the ship that tacks and veers, looms 
up in the mist and vanishes, always about to 
double the Cape of Good Hope, and always 
baffled in its attempt. Sain te-Beuve complained 
that Montesquieu had been far too optimistic 
in his forecast and had given men too much 



REACTION 71 

hope. It is one of the best modern champions 
of democracy who now sums up the esti- 
mate of human progress in a kindred nauti- 
cal trope to far gloomier purpose than even 
Sainte-Beuve would welcome. "The bark that 
carries Man and his fortunes," so Mr. Bryce 
concluded a recent address/ "traverses an 
ocean where the winds are variable and the 
currents unknown. He can do little to direct 
its course, and the mists that shroud the hori- 
zon hang as thick and low as they did when 
the voyage began." 

This stupendous change from the mood of 
cheer and hope almost to despair is due in 
part to a clouding of the democratic vision, 
and in part to the recoil which is inevitable 
after such great expectations. The nineteenth 
century made tremendous promises; far as men 

1 Before the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Society, 1907, and 
printed in the Atlantic Monthly for August of that year. The 
contrast between this pessimism in terms of scientific de- 
mocracy, and the relatively optimistic tone of Mr. Bryce's 
political democracy, cited above, p. 13 f ., is very striking. One 
gets the same sort of contrast in Lowell's poems, already 
cited, and his official address on Democracy. 



72 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

had come to see into the past, farther yet 
should they see into the future ; and science, 
a democratic affair, was to give them a new 
religion. It turned out to be an age of broken 
promises; and since the crash of failure, de- 
mocracy has been cursed and banished from 
science, in great part because of a disappoint- 
ment which ought to have been explained 
away as hope deferred, but which was allowed 
to settle into a pessimism that borders upon 
despair. It can be shown, however, that in all 
this reaction the central and constructive de- 
mocratic idea has not been damaged, and that 
only the subordinate intentions, so to speak, 
of democracy, such as unlimited individual 
freedom, have really* gone to wreck. True of 
the wider movement, this statement is valid 
for the particular case of poetry, not so much 
of the poets who reflected the mood of their 
time or heralded the coming reaction, as of 
the way in which poetry was regarded by the 
scholar and the critic and of the spirit in 
which its history was written. We turn again, 
therefore, to the democratic movement, and 



REACTION 73 

ask what effect it had, not upon the practice, 
but upon the actual science of poetry. 

In the whole movement there was a constant 
desire to enlarge knowledge about mankind, 
that connaissance generate de Vhomme which 
had seemed such an exhilarating prospect 
even to Pascal. One spoke more and more 
about "man," more and more about the 
people; and it was only natural that these two 
conceptions should wake the same enthusi- 
asm, beget the same vague projects, run into 
the same abuses, and at last suffer the same 
fate as the kindred political ideas of freedom 
and popular sovereignty. It must be granted 
that scientific democracy shot at a very wide 
target. The accuracy of more modern scholar- 
ship could not be maintained in such genial 
community of studies as then prevailed ; there 
was no real specializing; and doubtless many 
of the abuses of democratic science should be 
traced to this amiable weakness. I have seen 
an extract from a review, written about the 
middle of the eighteenth century, which deals 
with a French treatise on poetics by one 



74 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

Father Mourgues. " The work done in geome- 
try by le Pere Mourgues/' says the Journal 
des Savants, " is ample warrant for the pro- 
priety of his reflections on poetry." Now it 
well might be that a little bracing work in 
the integral calculus would both fortify and 
recommend the student of Middle-English 
consonants; but that is not our modern way. 
It had been the French way for some time. 
Pascal's geometry did not injure him as a 
master in literature; and Voltaire could at 
once write the favourite verse of his epoch, 
sum up the sciences, and give a f rjesh task to 
investigation by such a treatise as the Essay on 
Manners and Customs. Above all, science 
called for ideas, provocative and pioneer ideas. 
It must be borne in mind, moreover, that 
poetry of that period was still, as it had been 
in Boccaccio's time, a kind of clearing-house 
for all the sciences; and with the sciences 
thinking in terms of the new democracy, a 
poet seemed to look out upon reaches of 
thought as fresh and appealing as the new 
day which Wordsworth greeted from West- 



REACTION * 75 

minster bridge. Science began to project the 
idea of mankind into the ages, enlarging the 
bounds o£ history, and into space, getting 
ethnological and sociological facts as a basis 
for comparative studies. Man was declared to 
be greater than any sum of men. Humanity, 
a new conception, came to include both of 
those " great societies on earth, the noble 
living and the noble dead." Vico had an- 
nounced the idea, to be sure, but few men 
knew Vico, nor did they really need to know 
him ; such thoughts were in the air. Montes- 
quieu and Turgot reasoned out this humanity 
into terms of progress ; Kant also pondered 
upon it; but Herder, noblest of all the 
noble warriors in the church militant, Herder 
preached it. He set it vibrating with emo- 
tion ; and by the very title of his treatise, 
Thoughts for the Philosophy of the History 
of Mankind, 1 opened wide and wind-swept 

1 It has been pointed out that the Philosophy of History, 
as a new conception, was due to Voltaire ; but the trail of 
the " conception " could be run back to Bacon, at least, — to 
" the ancients," even. The utterance of it is our concern. 



76 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

spaces for research. And then the People ! 
All the dead and all unborn souls yet to 
be had been included in that fine word " hu- 
manity." " People " was no new word, but it 
got a new meaning ; all the living sons of the 
earth had now a share in it, and all their ut- 
terance was sacred. It was Herder who opened 
the gates of human literature for outcasts and 
wayfarers upon the bypaths of song. " If you 
are worthy," he said, " come in." The voices 
of the people should have a hearing from 
learned ears. In eight and twenty elegiac 
verses which form the dedication of Herder's 
Stimmen der Volker y untranslatable verses 
they seem to me, will be found the very gospel 
of the democratic movement. All the great 
ideas of democracy keep tryst here, — free- 
dom, humanity, the people, — and something 
more, noblest and most precious of all, the 
quintessence. For Herder goes to the centre 
of things ; and the centre of things for Herder, 
as it was under such different circumstances 
for Montesquieu, is justice, universal justice, 
the heart of the social body. One hears of the 



REACTION 77 

influence on Herder of Rousseau, but it was 
the intoxication of youth which made those 
often quoted dithyrambs; men who had in 
whatever kind or degree the sense of justice 
soon freed themselves from the spell of that 
erratic genius. Even Napoleon, who owned to 
notable sentimental weaknesses and once was 
full of Rousseau's ideas, said to Roederer that 
he had come to be disgusted with them. In 
fact, the full measure of Rousseau's sentiment 
was as fatal to a literary theory as it was to a 
political creed. He told lost and baffled pro- 
gress to take its word of command from the 
heart, when he ought to have known that such 
a plan of campaign can come only from the 
head ; he set up mercy, a noble but individual 
virtue, a luxury of the private citizen, against 
justice, which is a social ideal and a necessity 
for the very existence of the state. In the 
eighty-third Persian Letter 1 Montesquieu had 
even made justice the highest pleasure of man. 

1 " Oui ... si j'dtois sur de suivre toujours inviollement 
cette e'quite' que j'ai devant les yeux, je me croirois le premier 
des hommes." 



78 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

To this splendid height where all the stars of 
heaven were seen, and out of the sentimental 
fog, Herder steadily rose ; and his great dedi- 
cation is an appeal to justice, to that higher 
sympathy, that greatest of all human concep- 
tions, which is achieved by no individual la- 
bour or aspiration, but by long processes of 
cooperative thought. The phrase of Hamann 
which Herder repeated and loved so well, that 
poetry is "the mother-tongue of man," is a 
fine sentimental phrase, as if from Rousseau 
at his best ; but the dedication, utterance of a 
mature student of poetry, borrows nothing 
from the genius of sentiment. To the unseen 
powers, to the " keepers of justice," says the 
poet, — using the old classical phrases, just as 
Dante, in his words of homage to the same 
transcendent idea, uses the clerical dialect, — 
he will dedicate the voices of the people, his 
selection of folksongs gathered from all the 
times and the places where his ear had caught 
the accent of humanity, — 

Euch weihe ich die Stimme des Volks der zerstreueten 
Menschheit. . . . 



REACTION 79 

From Herder's editor one learns that the powers 
immediately invoked, the " two Adrasteias," 
— and it will be remembered that Adrasteia 
is the other name of Nemesis — are Right- 
eousness and Justice, really the one conception 
of Justice. To them he dedicates what he felt 
to be the poetry of the people and an authen- 
tic message of the muse, — to Righteousness 
and Justice, not to pity or to mercy or to 
sentiment or even to freedom. This is very 
far from Rousseau; it is very far, too, from 
what now passes as the democratic or romantic 
idea in the study of poetry as an art ; but it 
is no accidental or random utterance. Scholars 
now know that Herder's dedication, composed 
late in life, merely puts into fiery verse his 
little prose sketch of popular song 1 written 
about the same time ; and from the two docu- 
ments one learns Herder's real motive and 
meaning when he invoked inexorable justice 
as guardian, source, and object of the poetry 
of the people. The material of folksong, so 

1 See Werke, xxrv, 263, in the fifth volume of Herder's 
Adrasteia, and excursus entitled Volksgesang. 



80 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

runs his prose, is of course that which the 
people like to hear, — " adventure, disasters, 
heroism, ancestral deeds, pangs of despised 
love/' but, above all, " the judgments of Adras- 
teia," when at last, howbeit with halting foot, 
she has overtaken the criminal, when she over- 
turns insolence, wreaks vengeance on the trai- 
tor, and hunts the reckless to his doom. So 
runs the prose, closely followed by the poem, 
which now, for its own ends, goes on with ma- 
jestic strain, bidding justice to bring all things 
to light, to answer the sigh of the prisoner as 
well as to baffle the triumph of the tyrant, 
and offering her not only the sorrows but also 
the joys of the people, love and hope and so- 
cial pleasures, the harmless jest and " the clear 
laughter of the throng.'' Then, in the last 
distich, Nemesis appears for answer, finger 
upon lip, as sign of retribution for vice and 
of reward for virtue. Can we help thinking of 
that other great democrat in poetry, a demo- 
crat in spite of his tory professions, Words- 
worth, composing another democratic document 
in praise of justice, — the " Ode to Duty"? 



REACTION 81 

Not Portia's speech about mercy, which is per- 
haps better poetry, but this solemn and noble 
apostrophe to justice, touches the highest eth- 
ical note in English verse. 

Stern lawgiver ! yet thou dost wear 
The Godhead's most benignant grace ; 
Nor know we anything so fair 
As is the smile upon thy face : , . . 
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong ; 
And the most ancient heavens through thee are 
fresh and strong. 

That is the real democratic antidote to the 
anarchistic and unchartered freedom o£ Rous- 
seau. 

We now understand Herder's dedication. 
What do all those phrases mean but the ideal 
which has been called, with conscious or un- 
conscious felicity, poetic justice ? Poetic just- 
ice is the supreme gift of democracy to liter- 
ature, and is rightly named from the art where 
it began; it is the noblest function of com- 
munal poetry, and a precious heritage from 
the best thinking — or aspiration, if one pre- 
fers the indefinite word — of the early social 
group. Wherever man has been sincere in his 



82 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

poetry, — and early art is mainly sincere, — 
he has made it tragic as to the individual, for 
that is precisely what happens in life; but run- 
ning side by side with this tragedy is an ex- 
pectation, an appeal to some higher power, 
which in the end, without averting tragic fates, 
nevertheless punishes the bad and rewards 
the good in terms of communal if not individ- 
ual happiness. That is the foundation of poetic 
justice, which is so often confused with the 
" happy ending " and with the row of grinning 
performers when the curtain comes down upon 
comedy. Poetic justice is a communal affair, 
and demands confidence in the destinies of 
the community. " Throw the good deed, the 
noble and self-sacrificing deed," it says, "into 
the common stock, and there, whatever may 
have happened to the individual, it will one 
day come gloriously and helpfully to light." 
Ten Brink has pointed out that every one of 
Shakespeare's tragedies, save perhaps Timon, 
has destruction at the end for its protagonist 
but promise of fair weather for the state. Now 
the place where tragedy and poetic justice 



REACTION 83 

learned to walk hand in hand was in earliest 
communal song; and Herder's great dedication 
of the Voices of the People recognizes this 
fact. The people imagine a community where 
right and justice must prevail. 

If one likes the Germans, one will love 
Herder; and I am tempted to add that if one 
will read Herder, one will be pretty sure to 
like the Germans. His works look very for- 
midable in the thirty thick volumes ; but he 
is good reading wherever one takes him. He 
was typical of the best of his time, and it is 
well not to call him by some literary nickname 
and so pass on. A. W. Schlegel was a better 
scholar, a finer critic, an abler and keener 
man of letters ; but he lacked utterly the fire 
of Herder's conviction, the winning and lov- 
able and yearning quality, the manhood. One 
story of Herder was current in the books half 
a century ago that when he lay on his death- 
bed he called out to his son, " Give me a great 
thought that I may quicken myself with it ! ' : 
Nor was his poetical charity indiscriminate; 
that fine passion for justice tempered his en- 



84 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

thusiasm and made him not only the prince 
of translators but a critic of the nicest judg- 
ment and taste. I have elsewhere pointed out 
how his idea of communal or popular verse 
was mingled with the idea of national, racial, 
representative, and how, like Percy, he had 
to keep his eye on the public who bought his 
selection ; so that a soliloquy of Hamlet may 
appear among his voices of the people, and 
may look to have its place there well defended. 
Herder welcomed the outcasts of poetry, but 
they must be sound and vigorous and ruddy 
with the pulse of genuine if lowly song. 

It was thus that the democratic idea of the 
poetic art found its best expression in these 
words of Herder, welcoming " die Stimme 
des Volks der zerstreueten Menschheit." Far 
greater poetry was abroad than this, and 
Herder himself would have been first to say 
that the folksongs, in and for themselves, had 
been collected on the lower foothills of Par- 
nassus; yet no single verse of all the poetry 
composed in two centuries has the sweep and 
significance of that verse of Herder's dedica- 



REACTION 85 

tion. Percy had stimulated the poets ; Herder 
like a champion entered the lists of criticism 
and scholarship, and triumphantly fought the 
fight of the ballad and the folksong, — sub- 
jects, as Scherer noted, which soon became 
two of the most important topics in German 
philology. From the outset, however, the sig- 
nificance of this dedication was steadily over- 
looked, and the positive truth of it has been 
ignored; while what the author never said and 
never meant to say has been imputed to him in 
terms as exact as a proposition in Euclid. His 
imagined community, his idea of the people as 
purged by those irresistible ministers of just- 
ice, was misinterpreted by the fanatics and 
was quite misunderstood by the feeble folk 
of criticism. His whole message about poetry 
was read backwards. He said that ballads are 
poetry, and he was made to say that poetry is 
ballads. He said, read Homer as if he were 
singing in the street ; and he was made to say 
that Homeric and other epic poems were com- 
posed and sung by a kind of hurdy-gurdy man. 
He held up the imagined community as the 



86 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

people, and said in effect that there, as in the 
church triumphant, should be the inspiration 
of all great ideas, all great art ; he is accused 
of referring the origin of all poetry to a mob. 
"I mean the folk," he once cried in vexation, 
"I do not mean the rabble." He said that all 
great poetry has the human appeal, harmonizes, 
as it were, with the choir invisible, speaks with 
the wide words of that imagined community 
and out of the heart of time; but this was 
taken literally; at first it was foolishly believed, 
and then it was far more foolishly derided. 1 

In all these confusions there is rich analogy 
with the political perversion of the demo- 

1 Texte (see /.-/. Rousseau, p. 432 f ., and throughout the 
book ) wavers somewhat between " cosmopolitan " literature 
and comparative literature. He virtually calls Herder founder 
of the latter, — but were there not many founders ? — and 
Rousseau, with Mme. de Stael as his expositor, founder of 
the first. If " cosmopolitan " refer to the art, and " compar- 
ative " to the science, an adjustment of claims may not be 
difficult. Rousseau's work in literature was almost as ben- 
eficent as his influence in politics was malign, provided one 
thinks only of the art and ignores his specific doctrines on the 
art. Opposed by Voltaire, he expanded literature, moved its 
outposts to advanced ground and made new frontiers. 



REACTION 87 

cratic idea. On the trail of Herder and others 
like him, who cherished the democratic idea 
and filled words like " humanity " and " peo- 
ple" with noble as well as new meaning, came, 
to pervert these ideas, the weakling, the fool, 
the knave. The weakling drenched all the 
sane ideas with sentimentality. The fool, if I 
may coin a word, sillified them, making out of 
them a system all the more preposterous for its 
affectation of logic. The knave, in fine, made 
them odious with hypocrisy. Sterne, of course, 
is the typical and master sentimentalist; but 
sentimentalists in poetic theory, which is the 
present concern, can be found by dozens under 
the flag of the romantic school, extremists 
without mercy, who in their quest of " un- 
spoiled poetry" seized on all the doggerel and 
even the vulgarity of the country-side, going 
into unedifying raptures over the spirit of the 
folk and the voice of nature and the great 
heart of the nation. They were the weaklings. 
Fools, in the old phrase, are too numerous to 
mention, and need no master; they are auto- 
didact. The knave can best be seen in type as 



88 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

Canning's famous "friend of humanity." And 
all their combined plashings and tramplings 
have fairly obliterated the great German's trail. 
So much for the people, as Herder's fine 
imagination conceived them, with new rights 
in literature and poetry, and as annexed, mis- 
understandings included, to the great idea of 
mankind. That conception of justice, inevita- 
ble, salutary, benign, and that conception of 
social order, were to have the range of all 
humanity, taking in not only the peasant at 
one's door, but the distant savage as well. 
Here again the sane and sound democrats 
must not be held responsible for the senti- 
mental perversions of later time. Rousseau's 
blameless savage was not the type of primitive 
man set forth by the founders of democracy; 
they knew well that progress means a low 
start, and they sought no Sir Charles Grandi- 
son in the half organized horde. The savages 
whom Turgot cited for the initial studies of 
progress are cruel and barbarous folk. " Alas," 
he laments, 1 "our own sires, and the Pelasgi- 

1 Work quoted, pp. 227, 266. 



REACTION 89 

ans who came before the Greeks, were like 
the savages of America !" Adam Smith, prac- 
tical man that he was, put up with no fancied 
native, but got a live specimen and had the 
fellow do a real war-dance in the drawing- 
room, while guests leaped upon chairs and 
tables for safety. Gray has a laugh in his let- 
ters * at this sort of experiment, and there are 
frequent references to it in the anecdotes of 
the day. Indeed, Herder himself was pro- 
foundly influenced by the forgotten but once 
famous dissertation 2 of Dr. John Brown on 
the Rise. Union, and Power, the Progres- 
sions, Separations, and Corruptions of Po- 
etry and Music, which bases a masterly piece 
of research in poetic origins upon the true in- 
formation about song and verse of the Ameri- 
can Indians recorded in the book of Lafi- 
tau. But all in vain. Until the ethnological 
evidence began to come in as material for the 
new science, sentiment and Kousseau took 
charge of the red man, and his poetry was set 

1 Ed. Gosse, in, 25. 

2 London, 1763. 



90 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

forth as a combination of Ossian and Martin 
Farquhar Tupper. 

Not only these perversions, these absurdi- 
ties, wrought by weakling and fool and knave, 
made ruin of the democratic idea in theories 
and history of verse ; the democratic move- 
ment itself, like all great systems and all re- 
forms, came to the catastrophe as a conse- 
quence of its own plans and design, and in a 
sense by its own virtue. For such a gigantic 
conception, so pushed to every possible end 
of thought, could not hold its parts together. 
The habit of referring all achievement to the 
masses, to confederacy, to union, concert, to 
the people, became so rife, that even the most 
practical and the most sacred studies were at 
last clouded by this abuse of the democratic 
idea. Ruskin is hardly too sarcastic when he 
says in one of his familiar letters to working- 
men, that a scientific person of the day gives 
" lectures on Botany to show that there is no 
such thing as a flower, on Humanity to show 
that there is no such thing as a man, and on 
Theology to show that there is no such thing 



REACTION 91 

as a God." For the very deists now began to 
revolt from celestial monarchy and became 
the upholders of an invigorated natural 
science which found no more need for the 
creator and governor of the universe than cer- 
tain hasty critics had found for the poet of a 
poem. It was as if Montesquieu had carried his 
quest for the spirit of the laws, the harmony 
of forces, into nature, and, having found this 
spirit, had proclaimed supreme function of the 
community sub specie eternitatis. The last 
strength of the democratic movement spent 
itself among the stars. It reckoned no longer 
with merely human progress, but projected 
its lines upon the infinite scale, and caught 
up that new word of evolution as a key to 
all the theologies. It evolved a cosmic demo- 
cracy. Bagehot, reactionary as he was, ex- 
pressed the nobler part of the democratic 
ideal by his phrase * " confidence in the uni- 
verse," a phrase revived with a difference by 
William James in his plea for " cosmic patriot- 
ism." George Eliot wrote the hymn for it in 

1 "Physics and Politics," Works, IV, 587. 



92 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

her one poem, the " Choir Invisible." But 
confidence in the universe, of that sort at 
least, has broken down. The cruelties of the 
universe, its failures and mistakes, but, above 
all, its cruelties, came to light, were put to 
question in many a poem, notably in In 
Memoriam, and were not explained away by 
the old watchword of uncreating but inevita- 
ble law. It is true that the facts were carried 
for a time by the idea ; but one after another 
props began to fall. The master column fell 
when that huge celestial projection of demo- 
cracy was denied, and when the old joy of 
thinking out the problem turned to bitterness. 
The democracy of science, in this respect, has 
failed ; and the reaction has set in motion two 
tendencies, one of which seeks again for cre- 
ative Intelligence, as can be noted in the re- 
searches of M. Fabre, and the other counsels 
search for nothing beyond material easements 
and inventions. On ultimate matters we are 
counselled not to think at all. Taking that 
wonderful people of France to whom is due 
the elaboration of the democratic idea, one 



REACTION 93 

sees at the beginning of the movement Mon- 
tesquieu with his faith in rational obedience 
to the spirit of the laws, and the redemption 
of the world by men who think. One sees 
Voltaire, cynic on the surface and infidel, 
but deist and enthusiast at heart, pointing 
to the future, and full of hope in the possi- 
bilities of a world which has once learned 
how to think. That is his cure for all mortal 
ills. " Let happen what will," wrote the author 
of Candide to Condorcet, "man cannot be 
kept from thinking ; and the more men think, 
so much the less unhappy will they be." 
Voltaire could overthrow metaphysical optim- 
ism, but he was himself optimist in terms of 
human progress. Now in Voltaire's stead we 
have M. Anatole France, most charming and 
reassuring of cynics, who toys in his superb 
prose with every system of thought which 
man has known, finds them all as futile as 
amusing, and gravely declares that thinking 
is the most dangerous of vocations and if in- 
dulged too freely will break up the world. To 
shout the old democratic war-cries, to appeal 



94 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

to the ages and affirm belief in human pro- 
gress, is now audacious and impertinent. Fic- 
tion, which has come to transcribe the tem- 
per of the time more accurately than verse, 
either follows the advice — not the habit 
— of M. Anatole France, cheering and be- 
guiling, but not inebriating, and attains its 
end by paralysing the processes of thought ; 
or else it gives the unredeemed tragedy of 
things, as in the novels of Mr. Thomas Hardy, 
until one cries out with old Sidonius Apolli- 
naris, who watched Rome falling everywhere 
to pieces and furbished up a fine bit of rhe- 
toric for comment, — " abject necessity to 
be born ! pitiable necessity to live ! hard 
necessity to die ! " — necessitas abjecta nas- 
cendi, vivendi misera, dura moriendi ! That 
is as comprehensive as the curse of Ernulphus, 
and may serve as a kind of epitaph over the 
final collapse of the democratic movement. 

Yet it was in the midst of this collapse that 
two men, each perfectly sure of himself and 
of his cause, proclaimed the triumph of de- 
mocracy in literature, one of them for the art 



REACTION 95 

of poetry, and the other for the science. The- 
oretic victory seemed to be achieved by Taine, 
victory in practice by Walt Whitman. The re- 
action has at last condemned them both; and 
a question for us to solve is whether, in theory 
or in practice, they were real exponents of the 
central democratic idea. 



Ill 

WHITMAN AND TAINE 

How, then, did the democratic movement find 
official expression, so to speak, in the poetry 
of its day, and in what final authoritative 
shape was the democratic theory of poetic art 
placed before the world ? It is a commonplace 
that democracy and science were the dominant 
forces of that age which closed with the wan- 
ing nineteenth century, and which had pro- 
duced some of the great if not the greatest 
poets, and some of the very greatest scholars 
of all time ; it is well to come to terms with 
it, or at least with the part of it where our in- 
terest lies, and to cast up the account so far 
as we can command the facts. Poetry was still 
conceded by the nineteenth century to be the 
nobler part of literature. The poet of that 
time had not only the old ideas of freedom, 
of sovereignty of the people, quickened with a 
new life, but he had the overwhelming idea of 



WHITMAN AND TAINE 97 

cosmic democracy, of a confederacy of natural 
forces working by uniform law, which long 
before and in other guise had moved Lucre- 
tius, but came now as fresh revelation, con- 
firmed by a series of the most amazing discov- 
eries and inventions. Political ideas, of course, 
worked their way into poetry, and criticism 
has traced their path with considerable suc- 
cess. Brandes, in his book on nineteenth-cen- 
tury literature, accounts for them, their action 
and reaction, their confusion with what one 
calls ideas of the Komantic School, and how 
they subdued the poet or were subdued by 
his genius. It is an ill critical wind which does 
not blow you Heine's boast that he was a poet- 
soldier of the war for freedom, and an explan- 
ation of his exact meaning in telling his fair 
friend on the Brocken that he was a Knight 
of the Holy Spirit. His plea — 

Alle Menschen, gleichgeboren, 
Sind ein adliges GeschlecM — 

is a right Heinesque emendation of Rousseau. 
For France, Victor Hugo leaves one in no 
doubt with regard to his arm of the demo- 



98 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

cratic service, and his rank; creatively, his 
conception of the Miserables, not to speak 
of the plan of the great poems, is one of the 
most tremendous communal ideas ever known ; 
while in theory, his preface to Cromwell is in 
part a plea for democracy in poetic origins. 
Mr. Courthope, again, for our solid English 
contingent in political verse, tells a good tale 
of the democratic doctrine of Burns, of the 
whiggism in Campbell and Moore, of the ex- 
plosive stuff in Byron. No political nickname 
should deface the monument of Keats; but 
his sympathies were democratic, and his po- 
etry, in a deeper sense than is applicable to 
Wordsworth's verse, was a return to nature. 
Mild as Shelley seemed, a vegetarian, tend- 
ing to mercy, and in love with all lovable and 
frail and help-craving things, critics have 
rightly taught us to see in his verse the red 
glare of the revolution itself. Landor, an in- 
vincible aristocrat, played democracy in his 
poems, and passed the tribuneship on to Swin- 
burne, " the oldest to the youngest singer 
whom England bore," to the Philippe Egalite 



WHITMAN AND TAINE 99 

among modern republicans. Men who count 
as minor poets, too, and isolated poems from 
unsuspected places, could be invoked for wel- 
come aid in making up a democratic antho- 
logy; Mr. Quiller-Couch, for example, chose 
wisely when he printed in his Oxford Book 
of Verse that effective paraphrase of an Irish 
song made by the defeated patriot going into 
exile and lamenting dead friends of the lost 
cause. It is the test of a catholic love of 
poetry when one can like the brave naked- 
ness of the final stanza, Homeric at least in its 
roll of names : — 

'T is my grief that Patrick Loughlin is not Earl of Irrul 

still, 
And that Brian Duff no longer rules as Lord upon the hill, 
And that Colonel Hugh McGrady should be lying dead and 

low, 
Ajid I sailing, sailing swiftly from the County of Mayo. 

Clearly for all of these poets "freedom is a 
noble thing," and for most of them the world's 
great age begins anew with the sovereignty 
of the people. 

Yet all this democracy is only on the sur- 
face, nor is the matter finally adjusted when 



* • 

» 



100 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

romanticism, or medievalism, has been called 
to the aid of politics. Political and social ideas, 
romantic ideas, may cover the face of the 
waters ; but, deeper down, the current and real 
force of the movement to democratize poetry 
can be termed in accurate phrase neither polit- 
ical nor social, neither revolutionary nor ro- 
mantic, — whatever romantic may mean, — 
not even a matter of doctrine. Its steady flow 
is evident in the verse of tories like Words- 
worth and realistic poets like Crabbe. Its re- 
presentatives, each after his kind and in his 
own way, sought to put vigor and freshness 
and efficiency into the art by making it more 
spontaneous, by bringing poetry closer not 
only to nature but to the people and to the 
beginnings and unspoiled early phases of life, 
— an effort which I have already described 
in its high spirits, its hope and alacrity, as a 
concern of the aufklarer no less than of the 
romantiker, and by no means a mere yearn- 
ing for liberty and landscapes. All these un- 
conscious democrats in verse make a very mixed 
company when seen from other points of view. 



WHITMAN AND TAINE 101 

Here is Erasmus Darwin, " enlisting," as he 
says, " imagination under the banner of sci- 
ence," achieving poetry in the title of his 
" Loves of the Plants" only to lose it utterly 
in the maze of the Botanic Garden. Near him 
is Coleridge, going to Sir Humphry Davy's 
lectures on chemistry in order to get fresh 
metaphors for verse. Then come theorists, like 
those Unitarians, Quakers, dissenters generally, 
who had formed a very interesting society at 
Manchester to compensate them for the priv- 
ileges denied them at Oxford and Cambridge, 
— not by any means a negligible group. North- 
wards, Adam Smith and Lord Monboddo, eager 
to come at the causes of poetry and language 
and custom and myth, had long been explor- 
ing lexicons of the savage tongues, books of 
travel, and setting up a right red Indian of 
the west to sing a war-song and show Bellona 
in an early lyrical mood. Theorists these ; but 
yonder, seemingly leagues removed from them 
in space as indeed he was in time, though really 
bent on the same kind of quest, is that noblest 
tory of all the tories, Sir Walter himself, gath- 



> i 



102 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

ering unspoiled poetry of tradition, which he 
loves and studies to such purpose that his own 
" Battle of Harlaw," sung by Elspeth in the 
Antiquary, is nearest to original of all imi- 
tated ballads, while Proud Maisie is in the 
Wood passes anywhere as a folksong. With 
Scott, too, come the heterogeneous assembly of 
collectors and antiquarians whom one touch 
of balladry made kin. Whatever their politics, 
all these ballad-hunting folk, by their revision 
of the idea of poetry and their revival of nat- 
ural diction, were literary democrats to a man. 
We are wont to centre ballad praise and crit- 
icism in Herder, and ballad hunting and print- 
ing in Percy. But Percy's doings in this way, 
— he wrote of them to Pinkerton, in 1778, 
as " levities, I might almost say follies, of my 
youth," trifles taken up "as other men take 
up cards, to unbend and amuse the mind," — 
were only part of a very wide stir; and the 
account of his own labours ill fits such a word 
as "trifles" or "levities." Shenstone writes 
to one MacGowan, 1 a capable Scot, about the 

1 Sept. 24, 1761. See Nichols, Illustrations, etc., vn, 220 f., 
also 277 f., 281. 



WHITMAN AND TAINE 103 

labours of the future bishop, — his six aman- 
uenses, the libraries that have been ransacked, 
and the correspondents who are busy both 
afield and abroad, " in the wilds of Stafford- 
shire and Derbyshire, in Ireland," in the new 
world itself. It seems as if Percy had in mind 
a huge and truly democratic undertaking in 
letters, no less than a sort of universal and 
secular anthology, " voices of the peoples" on 
still grander scale ; but the collector's courage 
drooped, and some of his agents made unfav- 
orable reports, Mr. Grainger tries to get Percy 
some genuine wild verse from the West Indies, 
but has to put up with specimens of sugar- 
cane instead, which, indeed, he prefers. " Prom 
what I have seen of these savages," he writes, 
" I have no curiosity to know aught of their 
compositions" ; and Percy got no-" Charibbean 
poetry" for his Reliques. There is also, by 
the way, no trace in that book of the poetry 
of children ; and, indeed, a very slight acquaint- 
ance with the ingenious editor and his regard 
for Dr. Johnson's satiric powers, is enough to 
explain the omission both of the savage and 



104 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

of the child. Nevertheless, infantile poetry 
was due somewhere in this series of efforts to 
win back the voice of simplicity and unspoiled 
nature ; along with wild men, rustics, last min- 
strels, and ancient rhapsodes, there was a place 
for the child and childish verse. When and 
where sprang up first the poems and stories 
of childhood? What is there before Goethe's 
Mignon, before William Blake's Songs of In- 
nocence, before Wordsworth's adorable and 
unadorable simplicities ? 

Be that as it may be, there can be no ques- 
tion about the effort to democratize poetry 
by a return to nature in the deepest sense. 
Wild men's verse and rustic poetry were 
only sign-posts on the way to the wild things 
and the outright nature about which poets 
ought to write. Essays of a century and a half 
ago point out this more excellent way. Poetry 
had become insipid, they said, imitative, life- 
less ; it should get natural subjects at first 
hand, as Vergil did in his Georgics, describ- 
ing however those new wonders of which Ver- 
gil never knew ; not piping of shepherds, and 



WHITMAN AND TAIXE 105 

roses, and oak-trees, and all that, but telling 
about the migration of birds, or the palma 
maxima, the Calabash Tree, or the " enormous 
gigantic serpent of Africa." It is all very well 
to laugh at this prattle of the good Dr. Aikin, 1 
at the melancholy result of his advice as taken 
by Erasmus Darwin, at those hymns in prose 
about " natural objects," written by Aikin's 
sister, Mrs. Barbauld, which English children 
were learning by heart well into the preceding 
century, — and there is plenty of fun in these 
writings not yet coined for modern circulation ; 
but one does not laugh at a poet like Andre 
Chenier, whose poem 1? Invention not only 
recalls the advice of the Manchester sages, 
who made such protest against the classicism 
of Oxford, but may even have been inspired 
by Manchester essays. In any case, Chenier 
spent two years in England ; and his Invention 
simply consists in combining, so to speak, the 
resources of Oxford and Manchester ; the poet, 
he said, should retain the splendours of ancient 

1 John Aikin, M.D., Essay on the Application of Natural 
History to Poetry. Warrington, 1777. See pp. 3, 33 ff., 131, 147. 



106 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

poetic form, and annex the conquests of sci- 
entific thought. He projected a poem to be 
called Hermes, which was to chant the pro- 
gress of humanity ; and this young royalist lays 
down a fine democratic scheme for all poetry to 
come, retaining, of course, the poetics urged 
in his Invention : l — 

.... qu'enfin Calliope, eleve d'Uranie, 
Montant sa lyre d'or sur tin plus noble ton, 
En langage des dieux fasse parler Newton. 

That is what the critics like to quote; but it 
is well worth while to read all the notes for 
the new poem, and to compare the scope of this 
scheme for modern poetry with certain famous 
proposals of our own bard of the west a half- 
century later. Walt Whitman has been coupled 
with many strange poets ; but I do not recall 
the name of Andre Chenier, poet of science 
if not of democracy, in that formidable list. 

Aikin urged the poets to sing the song of 
nature, to tell of the heavenly bodies, — 
"objects," as he puts it, "so vast and magni- 
ficent, rolling with even pace through their 

1 ii, 60. 



WHITMAN AND TAINE 107 

orbits, light springing from its inexhaustible 
source, mighty rivers formed in their subter- 
ranean beds. . . ." Now all this is democracy 
of that appeal to universal laws which has been 
noted as getting the upper hand in nineteenth- 
century thought ; and the nineteenth century 
had not begun when Aikin urged a change 
of subjects or even when Chenier planned his 
poem. It must be allowed, however, that these 
promises to poetry from science have not been 
kept. Chemistry did nothing for Coleridge, 
who got his best matter for his best poem from 
an old book of travels and from a superstition 
that science would have scouted in disgust. 
Even such reaches and vistas of cosmic force 
as the romance of geology, the nebular hy- 
pothesis, the epic of evolution itself, tremend- 
ous idea, have done little or nothing for the 
other poets. Tennyson's evolutionary verses 
do not reach the heart of the matter ; we only 
see him falling upon the great altar-stairs, 
and not even, like Sir Thomas Browne, los- 
ing himself in his Altitudo ; and for what 
is perhaps his finest description of the long 



108 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

development of man he takes his figure not 
from the shock of systems and the progress of 
the ages, but from the process of forging steel. 
The scientific use of the imagination works 
wonders, but not in poetry, where it has per- 
haps served to sharpen the sense of tragedy, 
of human futility, but has begotten no great 
and recorded verse. 

The democratic poets not only tried to come 
close to the mighty works of nature, but they 
were also fain to freshen their own labours by 
getting the secret of her power. Sir William 
Jones, in one of the two essays prefixed to his 
translations " from the Asiatick Languages," 1 
a fairly memorable book, advises the poetic 
artist to gain his ends "not by imitating the 
works of nature, but by assuming her power, 
and causing the same effect upon the imagin- 
ation which her charms produce to the senses/' 
Assume her power ? Why not make one's self 
the channel of that power in all its creative 
force? This idea was in the air for a round 
century, beginning in transcendental and mys- 

1 Poems, etc. Oxford, 1772. 



WHITMAN AND TAINE 109 

tic guise, and ending in the precise mathemat- 
ics of the theory of Taine. By either reckon- 
ing, poetry became a sort of tracing made au- 
tomatically by the sum and sequence of times. 
William Blake, most democratic of all the 
poets, declared himself to be that " passive 
master," sung by our own Concord seer, who 
simply lent his hand to the " vast soul" above. 
It was assuredly a very complicated as well as 
vast soul that dictated the prophetic poems to 
Blake; even Tiriel, which has its own lure, 
is fairly clogged with all the fogs, dark- 
nesses, plagues, and indiscriminate machinery 
of death. Here, moreover, the "vast soul" 
feels itself free to dictate in loose measures, 
and to give the willing pupil plenary dispens- 
ation from all ordinary self-imposed restraints 
of art. Fetters of every kind were being broken 
during those glad democratic days ; and in 
many poet-souls there rose revolt against the 
fetters of a regular verse, although it is clear 
that great poets like Goethe and great masters 
of prose like Rousseau did not set any seal of 
approval upon the new blend. Goethe's " free 



110 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

rhythms " are really verse, and Rousseau's 
most effective and " poetic " passages are 
really prose. It is curious that for the most 
part one has to get the individual poet's point 
of view about the unfettered verse, take his 
word that it is most carefully and artfully 
made, and then find it utterly unreadable. 
Professor Bliss Perry l quotes the remarkable 
statement of Blake about what happened when 
his strange unfettered verse " was first dic- 
tated " to him, and of course refers to Swin- 
burne's early enthusiasm, and to the parallel 
of Blake and Whitman. Democracy hovered 
over all this poetic experiment and renovation. 
It was almost behind the barricades of 1848 
that Richard Wagner wrote his essays to tell 
not only how past litanies of nations had come 
from the burning core of communal emotion, 
but how to lure up national litanies of the 
future. " Who," he cries, " is to be the artist 
of the future? The poet? The actor? The 
musician ? The sculptor ? Let us put it in a 
word : the People." Here is the sincere milk 

1 Walt Whitman, pp. 88, 187. 



WHITMAN AND TAINE 111 

of the word of democracy. It is true that 
Wagner himself interpreted this new artist in 
a halting way; he had to revive a distant and 
chaotic nationalism for his themes and let a 
vague communism speak in his verse. It was 
a democrat of the western world who under- 
took to voice the people, to transcribe the age, 
to hail the ventures of new thought, science, 
the whole rush and roar of things, and so chant 
with a will the litany of all ages and places. And 
Blake's oracular word, " Poetry fettered fet- 
ters the human race," heard or felt in mysteri- 
ous communication of spirit to spirit, heartened 
this poet of the western world to be his own law 
of verse. What Chenier half planned to do, in 
exquisite proportion and harmonious rhythm, 
was now done, with freedom from all bonds of 
form, and in the largest possible bulk, by the 
most conspicuously seen, the most hotly praised 
and heartily flouted poet of all the mortal list. 
World and life and time spoke through Walt 
Whitman. And we cannot evade this question : 
was Whitman the real poet of the people, the 
ultimate expression of true democracy in art? 



112 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

Let the man's egotism, his creative and 
monarchic note, cast no doubt upon his de- 
mocracy; for this sense of the Me as mere 
transmitter always begets an enormous ego- 
tism on the subject. 1 The greatest political 
democrats have it, — Mirabeau, Cromwell. 
Napoleon, hugest egotist of all, liked to think 
himself the mere agent of fate. Particularly 
is this true of the arch-democrat of letters, 
Rousseau, between whom and Whitman Pro- 
fessor Perry 2 has drawn the lines of resem- 
blance with sufficient skill. And Walt Whit- 
man is plainly the democrat in poetry — 
waiving all dispute about the artistic fact — 
with whom the great movement came to its 
end, and for whom one must account quite as 
rigorously as one accounts for Rousseau. The 
critics make much of Whitman as the poet of 
science as well as of democracy ; but science, 
except in the gross as traffic and invention, 
does little for him. Mr. Perry rightly sees the 
significance in the opening lines : — 

1 See the passage in his own " review n of Leaves of Grass, 
beginning " What good is it to argue about egotism ? . . . " 

2 Walt Whitman, pp. 277 ff. 



WHITMAN AND TAINE 113 

One's self I sing, a simple separate person, 

Yet utter the word democratic, the word En-Masse. 

If Whitman shall not keep the word of pro- 
mise to our ear and break it to our hope, here 
is true democracy, the right dualism of com- 
munity and individual. And for the part of 
the " passive master/' Whitman's own words, 
written in the last solemn days of his pilgrim- 
age, will be enough. " All my volumes," he 
says, "are . . . spontaneous, following im- 
Illicitly the inscrutable command, dominated 
by that Personality. ... If I have chosen 
to hold the reins, the mastery, it has mainly 
been to give the way, the power, the road, to 
the invisible steeds. • . . " 1 

Has Whitman, then, said the word as poet 
of democracy ? It is a serious question. The 
critics who do not take him seriously and do 
not accord him the rights at least of a belli- 
gerent in his revolt against poetic tradition, 
are grievously in the wrong. Nor is the pre- 
sent concern with him critical in its aim ; it 
has to do with him as the self-announced 

1 Prose Works, p. 522. Italics are mine. 



114 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

champion of democracy in what he fearlessly 
called verse. He composed this poetry of Jthe 
people in phrases which have been so parodied 
into terms of the mere bavard that their fre- 
quent dignity and eloquence, their tenderness, 
their vigor, their pathos of hope, are too often 
forgotten. At their best, they recall Herder 
himself welcoming the outcasts of song, die 
Stimme des Volks der zerstreueten Mensch- 
heit. Probably, as in Swinburne's case, the 
young Herder would have welcomed Whitman 
jubilantly as prophet and poet, and the mature 
Herder would have rejected him. Whitman 
was fain to enfranchise the literary slave; and, 
like all the great evangelists, he would set the 
whole world at ease. The sweep of his demo- 
cracy, as we all know, was terrible; and it is 
exhilarating to see him put philanthropical 
readers of poetry to their shifts. "Nothing 
shall be common or unclean, you say," 'he tells 
them. " Very well, sit down here and munch 
a dirty crust with this tramp ! ' He would 
have none of those dirty crusts, even when he 
regretted them, taken out of his Leaves of 



WHITMAN AND TAINE 115 

Gi*ass. The world wanted new poetry and 
should have it, — not the worn language of 
the gods, not Newton even, but the authentic 
speech o£ man ; not conventional matter, but 
sights and sounds and smells straight from 
life, clamour of streets, harbours, factories. He 
would lead a great democratic choral where 
the voice of every man and woman and child 
should be heard,- — sovereignty of the people, 
as never before. Other poetry, said Whitman, 
who concerns us here, I repeat it, as neither 
the genius nor the charlatan of warring critics, 
but simply as the claimant of ultimate ex- 
pression for these days of the democratic 
movement in verse, other poetry had been 
artistic, and had been proportioned like a 
temple or a palace; his own utterance should 
have the large and unfettered accent of the 
sea. Here is individual freedom, leaving 
Wordsworth's early doctrine far behind in 
a short and comprehensive formula : say 
what you will, of what you will, how you will. 
All tributes are one to the sea ; it takes 
alike the brooks and rivers, the rains of 



116 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

heaven, the refuse and nameless waste of 
the town. So it is with Whitman's oceanic 
verse, if we allow his claim. Elsewhere this 
verse is said to be an eagle's flight as com- 
pared with the low haunts of the nightingale ; 
but the sea is his own choice for a simile. His 
admirers thought this ocean of his rhythm to 
be a rising tide. "Impassioned prose," wrote 
Professor Corson in a letter to the bard, " will 
be the poetic form of the future," and as " its 
most marked prophecy' 2 must be counted 
Whitman's Leaves of Grass. 1 That would be 
triumphant democracy indeed ; but unluckily 
" impassioned prose " had been plotting for 
the throne of poetry long before Whitman 
championed it, and seems to be still in the 
precarious state of other pretenders and claim- 
ants. Turgot, a century and a half since, 
greeted the poem in prose with high hopes of 
its future ; nor can it be said to have been 
praised and neglected. Soon Ossian was on 

1 Traubel, With W. W. in Camden, i, 414, 287.— It is 
curious to note how certain authors think that they are 
pioneers in this sort of writing. De Quincey actually thought 
he had invented " impassioned prose " for his Opium-Eater. 



WHITMAN AND TA1NE 117 

everybody's lips ; and, as Graham l notes, the 
"peculiar rhythmical prose" of this transla- 
tion or invention "had been suggested by 
Home, it being that form in which Bishop 
Lowth had recently rendered the Psalms." 2 
Great poets were fascinated for a moment by 
Ossianic diction, and preferred it to the really 
impassioned prose of Rousseau, a far nobler 
work of art, and to the limpid, sinuous flow 
of words such as Coleridge afterwards used in 
his fragment about Cain. Goethe letsWerther 
translate Ossian for Lotte ; parts of the diary 
and of the letters are in the same rhythm. 
Westphal has pointed out that the so-called 
streckverse of Jean Paul played on the verge 
of regular rhythm, and that Fritz Reuter's 
pathetic prose is often a kind of verse. Whit- 

1 Scottish Men of Letters, 1901, p. 229. 

2 I must take issue with Mr. Perry ( W. W., p. 282) when 
he says that freer rhythm, or hybrid verse, is something 
which the public has been liking more and more during the 
past fifty years. The unfettered rhythms were in far greater 
favour over a hundred years ago ; barring a few experi- 
ments by Henley or another, no really capable poet has taken 
them up. The desire for " free n verse is outcome of the 
same revolutionary spirit which inspired Rousseau. 



118 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

man, we are told, warned himself against get- 
ting too much Ossian into his lilt ; and Mr. 
Perry, in an important passage, shows the very 
close resemblance of Whitman's movement to 
that of a poem by Samuel Warren, called The 
Lily and the Bee, and thinks that this was 
known to the American. But one does not 
ask so much where a poet gets his tune as how 
he sings it; it is bad pragmatism, as well as sad 
nonsense, to talk of Tupper, or even to point 
to the disastrous stuff which can be quoted 
by pages from the Camden seer himself. No- 
body reads Tupper, and nobody would read 
Whitman so far as those passages are con- 
cerned. One does read and one will read the 
nobler lines of the good gray poet, will delight 
in their full-blooded optimism, will listen gladly 
to the voice of cheer, hope, health, serenity, 
brotherhood. One will not withhold praise, for 
instance, of that choral grief, so amazingly 
vivid in the lament for Lincoln, and of many 
another piece. Who is proof against the power 
of the short but vivid poem on death ? 

Are these, now, really poems, and are they 



WHITMAN AND TAINE 119 

to be recognized as verse? Professor F. N. 
Scott has undertaken to find a regular or 
quasi-regular scheme for Whitman's rhythms 
in terms of the advancing and retreating wave, 
the poet's own comparison, 1 — used also, as will 
be remembered, by a modern poet, for that very 
different and very regular verse-movement, the 
sonnet. Professor Barrett Wendell, on the 
other hand, has compared the rhythm of 
the Leaves of Grass to hexameter trying 
to bubble up through sewage. The lists seem to 

1 He often mentions it. In one of his " reviews n of his own 
poetry (printed in full, Perry, W. W. p. 207 ff.) he says his 
verse has no tropes, and is " of an irregular length of lines, 
apparently lawless at first perusal, although on closer exami- 
nation a certain regularity appears, like the recurrence of 
lesser and larger waves on the seashore, rolling in without 
intermission, and fitfully rising and falling." Fitfully is an 
ominous word ; the pulse of poetry must be regular, health- 
born, normal. It is the fashion just now to contrast metre 
and rhythm, using the latter for prose as well as for poetry. 
But rhythm, in the sense of ordered and regular movement, 
must not yield to the idea of mere measure — like ticking 
clocks and flawless agreement of intervals — as material test 
of poetry. If the rhythm or movement is regular on the 
large scale, shows a definite order, a scheme, then, and only 
then, is one dealing with poetry. 



120 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

be open ; and I should rather propose for com- 
parison that old favourite, Milton's picture of 
the creation of the animals, where the grassy 
clods calved, and the tawny lion half appeared, 

. . pawing to get free 
His hinder parts, then springs as broke from bonds, 
And rampant shakes his brinded mane. 

Certainly the lion must be recognized in Whit- 
man, and as certainly the something which 
keeps him from that freedom in self-restraint 
which marks all great and really artistic verse. 
Tennyson, a genuine admirer, said that Whit- 
man was a fine man, but no poet. Goethe's 
great sonnet, and Gautier's famous lines on 
Art, lay down a law which our good gray poet 
failed utterly to set aside ; no artist has ever 
been a law unto himself. And Whitman is 
nowhere so great a poet as when he is break- 
ing his own rules. In some of his poems the 
lion gets fairly away, bounds at will over the 
plain ; or, to change the figure, Whitman does 
seem at times to break down the barrier be- 
tween impassioned prose and verse, to give, 
as it were, the effect of mingled lights, of sun 



WHITMAN AND TAINE 121 

and of stars ; and when he achieves this twilight 
triumph, he compels sincere admiration from 
the most inveterate metrist. Take him at his 
best, — noting the beginning-rhymes, the re- 
petitions, the one fine hexameteT : — 

For once, and more than once, dimly down to the beach glid- 
ing, 

Silent, avoiding the moonbeams, blending myself with the 
shadows, 

Recalling now the obscure shapes, the echoes, the sounds 
and sights after their sorts, 

The white arms out in the breakers tirelessly tossing, 

I, with bare feet, a child, the wind wafting my hair, 

Listen'd long and long. . . . 

Then follows the lyric, also trembling on the 
verge of regular rhythm, haunting, compelling, 

wonderful Is not this the verse of a 

poet? Well, we will turn to some verses, also 
about the sea and a bird that loves its mate, 
put into the mouth of a rough old dying tramp, 
saying good-bye to his wife and to the world, 
— dramatic lyric, in other words, that is so 
antipodal to Whitman's lyric, but the work 
of a poet who was quite as much of an optim- 
ist and quite as little of an imitator as our 



122 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

democratic bard himself. It is the last stanza 
of Meredith's Juggling Jerry: — 

I mind it well, by the sea-beach lying, 

Once, — it : s long gone, — when two gulls we beheld, 

Which, as the moon got up, were flying 

Down a big wave that sparkled and swelled. 

Crack, went a gun : one fell : the second 

Wheeled round him twice, and was off for new luck : 

There in the dark her white wing beckoned : 

Drop me a kiss — I 'm the bird dead-struck. 

Now there are many interesting points to be 
made by a comparison of the two poems. In 
each of the quoted passages there is one line 
of the appealing kind; and the appeal is the 
same, a flash of white on black. The care to 
be subjective is as marked in one as the care 
to be objective in the other. Whitman is stu- 
diously reverent, stages himself as usual with 
all the properties and devices at his command ; 
Meredith is as studiously conventional in the 
best sense, brusque, incidental. One gives you 
"the greater drama going on within myself," 
as he calls it ; the other forces you to see the 
poetry of the human situation, its tragic sig- 
nificance and beauty. More than this. The 



WHITMAN AND TAINE 123 

beat of a regular rhythm means the continuity 
of art. Whitman deliberately rejects this im- 
perative rule to let the art maintain its empire 
even when, as is the case with every poet, 
genius flags and the great accent is lost ; he 
depends for support in these transitions upon 
mere massing of his material. And the very 
massing is chaotic. I am not going to make 
any cheap and unfair triumph out of Whit- 
man's famous descriptions by inventory, his 
catalogues. But for purposes of comparison, 
again, I should like to quote from Meredith a 
sketch or rough essay in description l of crowded 
wharves and harbour in their focal point of 
activity, — the scene from London Bridge. 
Here is very effective massing or even huddling 
of the material. " Down went the twirling hori- 
zontal pillars of a strong tide from the arches 
of the bridge, breaking to wild water at a re- 
move: and a reddish Northern cheek of curd- 
ling piping East, at shrilly puffs between the 
Tower and the Custom House, encountered it 
to whip and ridge the flood against descending 

1 One of Our Conquerors, chap. I. 



124 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

tug and long tail of stern-a-jerk empty barges ; 
with a steamer slowly nosing round off the 
wharf-cranes, preparing to swirl the screw ; 
and half-bottom-upward boats dancing har- 
pooner beside their whale ; along an avenue, 
not fabulously golden, of the deputy masts of 
all nations, a wintry woodland, every rag aloft 
curling to volume; and here the spouts and 
the mounds of steam, and rolls of brown smoke 
there, variously undulated, curved to vanish ; 
cold blue sky ashift with the whirl and dash 
of a very Tartar cavalry overhead.' ' That is 
not mere cumulative impression, a catalogue; 
it has both perspective and colour. Surely there 
is the seeing eye, the artistic grouping, the 
compelling word and phrase. Is it not poetry ? 
No. Meredith tells us himself that it is not 
poetry. Poetry, he implies in a neighbour sen- 
tence, is compounded of "form and fire." Now 
fire is something that Whitman can command; 
and he makes it flash through his nobler lines. 
But form he did not command, not, that is, 
in the sense of the traditional artistic self- 
imposed restraint, and if one throws away 



WHITMAN AND TAINE 125 

the conventions of poetry, one loses half the 
resources of one's art. Whitman deliberately 
refuses to keep step : and all the great poets 
do keep step, mainly in a very simple kind of 
march. They lead; but they lead in the con- 
sent of a consenting, coherent band. If Whit- 
man's verse can be proved to be artistic, reg- 
ular, governed by any definite law, then this 
objection breaks down. But proof of such art- 
istic restraint, such definite law, in Whitman's 
verse I have not yet seen. He cannot be the 
poet of democracy in its highest ideal who re- 
jects the democratic idea of submission to the 
highest social order, to the spirit of the laws, 
to that imagined community. 

Whitman's poetic democracy, like Rous- 
seau's, is not only redolent of the ego, of 
a kind of lawlessness ; it is destructive and 
not constructive. It does not explain the evil 
of the world, but ignores that evil after the 
fashion of a more robust Harold Skimpole. 
Admirable is the light but decisive touch of 
condemnation in William James's account x 

1 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 84 f. 



126 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

of the way in which this poet gets his " im- 
portance in literature" by expelling " all con- 
tractile elements" from his verse. All his sen- 
timents "were of the expansive order." But 
we have seen that optimism by the ignoring 
process is anything but democratic ; and I have 
ventured to suggest that the motto of demo- 
cracy should be " all 's for the best in the worst 
of worlds." But Whitman thought that a de- 
claration of independence removes evil from 
the universe. He frees the individual from 
what he calls tyranny; but he sets up no law 
to which the free individual shall submit. 
He says that he believes poets to be " the 
voice and exposition of liberty " ; * and this 
liberty is license. He declares outright that 
his aim is to be " essentially revolutionary." 
Part of this revolution, as in Rousseau's day, 
is against the second convention of artistic dis- 
guise. " See me, Walt Whitman, just as I am," 
is an invitation which means that his poetic 
"confession" is to come, as it were, from the 
witness-box and not from the conventional 
1 Preface of 1855 ; Prose Works, p. 270. 



WHITMAN AND TAINE 127 

shelter of artistry. In a remarkable defence of 
his poetic creed and practice, 1 he says that 
poems of the third and fourth class, perhaps 
of the second, need not be " actual emanations 
from the personality and life of the writers" ; 
but the first-class poem must be of the very 
poet himself and his life. Well, Goethe, who 
called his confession Dichtung und Wahrheit, 
has said that " dichten selbst ist schon Ver- 
rath " ; but the betrayal is of the artist and 
not of the man. No great poet ever put his 
naked Me into verse ; ink and paper are already 
a disguise ; and even the entry, made as sin- 
cerely as you could make it, in your private 
diary, has already taken on something of this 
conventional manner. It is not quite yourself. 
The " I " of every lyric poet is conventional, 
however sincere the utterance, however direct 
the confession. In vain, then, does Whitman 
cry out in his herald poem, — 

Unscrew the locks from the doors ! 

Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs ! 

That is a command which shall never be obeyed 

1 Prose Works, p. 322 f. "Notes left over." 



128 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

while poetry is an art of life. In art, as in 
nature, the universe cannot be built with no- 
thing but centrifugal forces. 

Whitman's nearest approach to the con- 
structive democratic idea is in his book on 
Democratic Vistas, written in very noble 
mood, and at a time when his experience of 
the republic in a crisis showed him dangers 
and threats with which we have now only be- 
gun to cope. But this book does not give us 
Whitman's poetic democracy. In the preface 
to the first issue of the Leaves of Grass x he 
says that the genius of the United States is 
" most in its eomihon people." Almost his last 
utterance 2 bases his trust in the American .peo- 
ple on " the bulk quality of the whole " ; what 
is not cryptic in a phrase like that is evil, and 
what is cryptic is vain. He has no perspective ; 
he will u glorify everybody." It is Schiller's 
" Seid umschlungen, Millionen," taken out of 
dithyramb, and put into a proposition. Whit- 
man's democracy, in a word, is ochlocracy; he 
has no ideal social order in mind, but man 

1 Prose Works, p. 520. 2 Ibid., p. 264. 



WHITMAN AND TAINE 129 

shall jostle man in a glad turbulent mob. His 
ship of state is a kind of Noah's Ark. I can- 
not grant him even an ideal America, apatria 
in the old Roman sense. He can succeed with 
a concrete fact like night — " Press close, 
magnetic, nourishing Night!" — but not 
with the abstract and ideal of an imagined 
community. With full recognition of the great 
values in his best work, his transcript of the 
hopes and fears and agonies of war-time, his 
splendid if vague appeal to the country and 
his fulness of hope in her destiny, his cour- 
age, his humanity, so finely backed by the 
personal service of long and painful years, — 
notwithstanding all this, it must be said that 
America meant to him the environment of 
Walt Whitman, just as Switzerland or France 
meant birthplace or asylum of Rousseau. 
" The great composite democratic individual," 
which he says he set forth in Leaves of Grass, 
is himself. 

One is not sure whether to say that Whit- 
man failed to become the poet of democracy, 
or to say that democracy deserted the man 



130 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

who might otherwise have been her poet. 
While he was chanting the large words of 
his message, the democratic movement broke 
ranks; national enthusiasm flagged; and the 
devotion of a few admirers, the good wishes 
of men of letters here and there, could not 
make up for that large recognition which 
would have been his lot in days when dithy- 
rambs and not a jest or a paradox or a good 
story expressed, as now, the popular feeling. 
Had he lived in Rousseau's world and time, 
he would have had something like Rousseau's 
success. Even a half century later, his rolling 
collar and studied costume would have had 
more magical effect than the red waistcoat of 
Gautier. He is not the representative poet 
of democracy ; for the cause itself was already 
facing wide reaction, and he had himself failed 
to lay hold of its central and constructive 
idea. Nevertheless, he stood for fundamental 
truths; he interpreted certain phases of na- 
tional life, notably the temper of our war-time, 
better than any one else ; and he is to be neither 
laughed nor parodied out of his place. 



WHITMAN AND TAINE 131 

Convention is a force, even if chiefly regu- 
lative in its working. Whitman, friend of 
democracy, undervalued convention, defied it 
even, and so parted with one of his best de- 
mocratic allies. The great historian of Eng- 
lish literature, the chronicler of the Origi?ies 
de la France Contemporaine, became on the 
other hand a resolute foe of political demo- 
cracy. He looked back upon the great revo- 
lution, as one of his countrymen remarks, 
through the smoke and the foul odours of the 
Commune. For him democracy meant un- 
bridled license ; it was a mad bull that " sees 
red," that tramples on all that is delicate, fra- 
gile, all that is august and sacred. 1 And yet 
this hater of political democrats is the most re- 
solute and extreme representative of that demo- 
cracy in science and in the theory of art, of that 
literary convention, which Whitman rejected 
and defied. What Taine hated, Whitman 
loved ; and what Whitman despised, Taine 
defended to the utmost of his formidable re- 
sources. Together the two men stand, differ- 

1 Deschamps, La Vie et les Livres, p. 324. 



132 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

ent as they are, united in their common mis- 
sion of saying the last authoritative words for 
the democratic movement. 

Convention, that is to say the active func- 
tion of the community, in very wide use of 
these words, was made by Taine sufficient 
explanation for poetry and for the other arts 
almost without reference to the individual 
mystery of creative power. If Whitman, ex- 
ponent of democratic art, thought that he 
could produce poetry as the expression of all 
the people, the en-rnasse, voiced at will of the 
over-soul by his individual self, Taine, on 
the other hand, in an extreme democratic apo- 
theosis of law, thought that he could explain 
poetry by convention, and could ground and 
found the everlasting science of it on the com- 
munity alone. Here, too, is mystery, the mys- 
tery of law ; and here too is the will to explain 
all things by one principle, to build up your 
universe with one force, to let the two-celled 
heart work with only one cell. Taine is the 
conventional monist. It is through him that 
the ultimate democratic faith in science can 



WHITMAN AND TAINE 133 

best be felt ; he undertook to find the explan- 
ation of every artistic fact in some inerrant 
and inevitable law. The romantic school has 
been derided often enough for its perver- 
sion of Herder's doctrine, for its absurdities 
about the heart of the people, about epics and 
ballads that sing themselves. No one would 
have joined more heartily in this derision than 
Taine, who, nevertheless, by the scientific 
path, came to conclusions about the making 
of poetry almost as extreme as those fancies of 
the romantic folk. His science, however, was 
not the old and shop-worn kind. He was a 
psychologist with new ideas. An amiable ig- 
norance of Taine's real theory confounds it 
with that ancient doctrine of climatic influ- 
ences, discussed in Greek philosophy, noted by 
Tacitus, on which almost every learned man 
of the eighteenth century, including even Dr. 
Johnson, had something to say, and which 
Landor summed up in certain charming Hel- 
lenics : — 

We are what suns and winds and waters make us. . . . 

Taine, of course, made this influence a part 



134 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

of his milieu, and in his books on Art had 
much to say of it; but it is only an old para- 
graph in his new chapter. His psychology 
was exact. It is not even true, as Hennequin 
charges, that Taine laid no stress on excel- 
lence of poetic or other artistic work. He laid 
immense stress on this excellence, and in his 
own field was an admirable critic ; but for 
Taine the artist who did the excellent work 
was simply an agent of the forces about him 
and in him, of the race, the moment, the 
milieu or environment, and counted only as 
a sign, a register of values. The poet or art- 
ist, by this reckoning, comes to be only a sort 
of bell-buoy sounding with the rise and fall of 
the waves, themselves obedient to a long and 
inevitable if complicated series of causes which 
rest in the last analysis upon invariable laws. 
In one sense, this theory does lead, if not 
to undervaluation of great work, at least to 
overvaluation of unimportant work; for all 
links in the chain are so many operative causes, 
and therefore important. Hence, I think, has 
come a little of that tendency in comparative 



WHITMAN AND TAINE 135 

literature to exaggerate the influence of the 
minor poet upon the great poet, and to restore 
reputations or, more often, to create them, by 
a doctor-thesis. But that is not Taine's real 
concern. Submission to the reign of inevit- 
able law, ecstasy over evolution as the prin- 
ciple of the universe, and a stoic attitude to- 
wards the pressure of things, towards the 
sadness which all this new lore forced upon 
the individual, — these are the ideas of Taine 
which help to make clear his doctrine of 
poetry. De Goncourt has a remarkable pass- 
age in the Journal l about the joyless youth, 
the mature seriousness of Taine, who took 
even his pleasures in a sort of scientific aus- 
terity. There is much of the stoic in him; he 
looked wide-eyed at the world, and, in George 
Eliot's phrase, took no opium. The individ- 
ual, he held, must not exalt his individual- 
ity ; it is a mere chemical combination, at the 
mercy of the forces plying always their inev- 
itable tasks about us ; the point is to observe 

1 m, 43 (9 April, 1866). The youth of Taine 's generation, 
he says, "had no youth at all." 



136 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

facts, to resolve them into right relations, and 
to find their cause. " Let the facts be physical 
or moral/' he says, "no matter; they always 
have causes ; there is cause for ambition, for 
courage, for truthfulness, as for digestion, for 
muscular movement, for animal heat. Vice 
and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar." 1 
It is very clear that for Taine there is to be 
no mystery of the genius of individual poets. 
He simply finds the cause of this genius in 
whatever combination of forces the law has 
brought about. In a letter to a friend, 2 he once 
defined art as "the general in the particular." 
It is almost as if the player himself were 
made by the rules of the game. Defending 
his theory, 3 protesting that literature is not 
the "record of ideas," but rather the history 
of the work of men of genius, he declares that 
his own. method is to " generalize " and then 
to " fill in " with great men as the particulars. 
But the great man and the great man's work, 

1 In trod, to Hist. Eng. Lit., in. 

2 May, 1854. See H. Taine, Sa Vie et sa Correspondance, 
ii, 47. 

3 Ibid., pp. 308, 370 ; and 156, 207. 



WHITMAN AND TAINE 137 

we remember, are for Taine but " signs"; 
the law is the thing. And submission to this 
law is man's religion ; in the end law must be 
right. Nowhere is the constructive idea of de- 
mocracy, taken, of course, as abstraction and 
intention, not worked out as a theory of 
science or of art, so well glorified in latter 
days as in Taine's praise of justice. 1 " There 
is nothing more beautiful than justice. I love 
history because it makes me take part in the 
birth and progress of justice ; I find it more 
beautiful yet because it seems to me the final 
development of nature. Everywhere, above 
and below us, is force. . . • This light of just- 
ice, of the right, it is for us to kindle and 
to carry across the wastes of nature and the 
violences of history." . . . Nothing could be 
more characteristic ; there is no democracy so 
noble as this. But one sees the mechanical, 
the fatal, the ultra-conventional tendency of 
Taine's doctrine. It is quite hostile to indi- 
vidual initiative; a confederacy of natural 
forces, animated by a single law, makes and 

i Ibid., ii, 121 (25 October, 1855). 



138 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

unmakes with mechanical accuracy all the 
combinations which we call facts. Man must 
even carry justice to its triumphs by obey- 
ing these inexorable laws. Here is the fatal 
error which left genius and individual ini- 
tiative out of the account, or rather reduced 
them to mere terms of convention; and the 
error is fatal because it foils a comprehensive 
triumph. Taine nearly solved the problem of 
art and so of poetry. Had he simply called his 
milieu, his place and time and race, conditions 
and not causes, had he seen the great dualism 
here, as one must see it in the universe, as play 
and interplay of centrifugal and centripetal 
forces, he would have achieved the w 7 hole in- 
stead of the half success. 

Taine refused to accept the artist, the genius, 
as an independent force in poetry ; and he 
would not concede what Sainte-Beuve in a 
memorable review 1 declared to be the final 
point, — "as it were, a last citadel, never to 
be taken," line derniere citadelle irreductible, 
sacred from even the most searching analysis 

i Now. Lund., 1884, vm, 87 f. 



WHITMAN AND TAINE 139 

of the critic and the scholar, the one thing 
inexplicable, the inventive genius of the poet. 
And this refusal, this neglect, was Taine's 
fundamental error in poetics. It is, of course, 
my desire to show that large and positive 
gains for the history of poetry as a social art 
have come from the disciples of the demo- 
cratic movement ; but it is necessary to point 
out how democratic extravagance defeated its 
own purpose by all the designed or undesigned 
efforts to put the great poet out of the poetic 
process. That citadel is not to be taken, and 
the man of genius is not to be ignored. How, 
then, does one come upon the trail of this 
great poet, and what are the authentic signs 
of genius? 

When Matthew Arnold or another collects 
" tonic ' : passages to prove by sample what 
great poetry may be, the selections are nearly 
all naked but powerful phrases which seem to 
have something like infinite space about them. 
They are to poor poetry, as we call it, what 
real thunder is to the thunder of the stage. 
Let us isolate such a passage even from its 



140 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

poetic environment. Take a verse of one of 
the Psalms in English : — 

And I said, this is my infirmity; 

but I will remember the years of the right hand of the Most 
High. 

Barring the very slight trope in substituting 
" years of the right hand " for " the times 
of manifested strength," — I speak now only 
of the translation, — neither the convention of 
rhythm, nor the convention of artistic disguise, 
not even the secondary convention of figurative 
diction, is present for English eye or ear or 
heart. There is a roll of harmonious sound, but 
it is not conventional verse; there is no flash of 
metaphor, no sunshine of simile, to light up 
the phrase ; and there is no community of sen- 
timent, — it is " the flight of the solitary to 
the Solitary." What one feels is poetic energy, 
the creative, imaginative power with which the 
verse vibrates as a panting man vibrates 
with the beating of his pulse. To be sure, the 
conventional elements are easily restored by 
crossing to the original. There was surely 
rhythm, else it could not have been sung ; 



WHITMAN AND TAINE 141 

there was the community of emotion in direct 
utterance, — for the " I " was probably con- 
gregational. As it stands for us, however, it 
is not what we mostly agree to call poetry ; 
yet it has in it that mysterious force, 1 with- 
out which no great poetry can exist. I say the 
" mysterious force " ; this force, mystery as it 
may be, constitutes for certain critics the only 
essential of poetry, and is their chief argu- 
ment in the case of Whitman. Professor J. A. 
Stewart, in his excellent book on the Myths 
of Plato* would call the operation of this 
creative power the soul of the poem, the essen- 
tial poetry, the genius of the poet as distin- 
guished from his art. The poet, says Professor 

1 Baehofen's parallel (in his study of the myth of Dae- 
dalus, Antiquarische Brief e, I, 120) of intellectuality and in- 
dividuality with the masculine force, "gegeniiber dem miit- 
terlichen Stoff, in dem die Gleichheit aller Erdgeschopfe 
wurzelt," could suggest reflections on paternity and modern 
authorship, over against the motherhood of the community 
and more spontaneous verse, which should be at least as pro- 
fitable as sundry reflections, still offered by pensive critics, 
on the nature of poetry. 

2 See p. 382 ff. See also the same author's Plato's Doctrine 
of Ideas , p. 140. 



142 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

Stewart, by this power, fxavriKy) kol0' vttvov, 
begets, as in a dream, his own vivid and won- 
derful state of mind in the patient, that is, 
the reader, who then looks over the border of 
reality out of the world of phenomena and 
sees the thing itself, the so-called " universal," 
the eternal verities. The sense of " poetic 
truth " is the feeling of having just now under- 
stood the true significance of things. For, to 
Professor Stewart again, "the Soul of poetry 
is apprehended in its Body at the moment 
when we awake from the Poet's Dream. . . ." 
This is true, though not all the truth. Whoso 
does not feel its truth, has never really read a 
great poem. We dream the poet's dream. This 
tallies with the fine word of Sainte-Beuve, 
perhaps the most beautiful of all those indefi- 
nite definitions of poetry, that poetry does not 
consist in saying everything but in making one 
dream everything : la poesie ne consiste pas a 
tout dire, mais a tout /aire rever. It tallies, 
too, with that haunting and exquisite couplet 
of Milton about the stuff of poets' dreams. More 
to the point, in Professor Woodberry's lectures 



WHITMAN AND TAINE 143 

on The Inspiration of Poetry there is an ad- 
mirable sketch of this dream of the poet, this 
poetic madness, coupled, however, with clear 
recognition of its ultimate origin in the enthu- 
siastic throng. Who shall gainsay these things? 
They are of the very ritual of poetry; and 
if poetry were only what Shelley calls it, the 
record of the best and happiest moments of 
the best and happiest minds, if all poetry were 
really dictated by the spirit of those moments, 
there would be no more to tell. But for the his- 
torian of the art as an element in human life, 
as a social art, the outgrowth of social endeav- 
our, the expression of social order, and in many 
ways a powerful factor in the making of society 
itself, these transcendental definitions are too 
narrow, too exclusive, and leave a good part of 
the historian's chosen field of poetry without 
any explanation whatever. Professor Stewart 
says that this vision of genius is intermittent ; 
the poet fills up the other and very large 
spaces with his art. Precisely ; and the con- 
cession is most significant provided one clearly 
understands what is meant by art, and does 



144 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

not confuse it with the mere technique of 
poetry. What are these long spaces not di' 
rectly inspired by genius, and what explains 
the making of them, the making of the art? 
Moreover, there are many poems of good 
standing, epic and the like, which utterly lack 
this magic of genius and these origins of celes- 
tial dreaming. Make genius the test and the 
explanation, not only are the heights of poesy 
left hanging in the air, but whole continents 
and ages of the art are undefined. Regina ar- 
tium is poetry, and i?icedit regina ; but her 
steps are on the solid earth, and her throne has 
been set among rude uncivil folk before she 
came to the realm which Plato and even Aris- 
totle described. Considerations of this kind, 
moreover, are available to show the necessary 
function of regular rhythm in the poetic art, 
and can evidently be applied to such a test-case 
as that of the poetry of Whitman. Art, says 
Professor Stewart, sustains the poet in the inter- 
vals between dream and dream. How? By con- 
ventions, notably by rhythm, — to be explicit, 
by metre. A play in prose, — colloquial or 



WHITMAN AND TAINE 145 

" natural " prose, — may reach the great tragic 
levels for people who speak the dialect of its 
day and think in its manner of thinking. Un- 
like regular rhythm, however, this dialect and 
this manner pass, and may fail to touch an- 
other age. This is the fate which Taine pre- 
dicted for Flaubert's famous romances. The 
prose novel gives indeed the manner of its day 
in terms of human nature itself; and it can 
wind its way into recesses where poetry can- 
not follow. We do not want Tom Jones in 
verse, but it is not a poem in prose ; nor do we 
want (Edipus or Homer's Iliad or King Lear 
in prose. The great novel in prose has its own ele- 
ment. But poetry, whether good or bad, floats 
on the navigable waters of rhythm; there are 
other graceful and rapid ways of motion, but 
they must not be called poetry. Now because 
regular rhythm is fairly permanent in its types, 
and appeals to age after age, it is invaluable 
in the dream-intervals of the poet. It cannot 
make the poor play a good play ; but it gives 
to the great play a kind of sustenance which 
keeps the greatness unimpaired. This is what 



146 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

men forget when they despise and deny 
rhythm as the essential condition — not the 
essential power — of poetry, when they protest 
that they think nobly of the soul and are not 
able to approve this opinion, — which, after 
all, in no wise assails the nobility of the 
soul, — that the soul must be incarnate in a 
body, the genius in the art, the poetry in the 
rhythmic scheme. Khythm from this point of 
view is an indestructible medium of human 
emotion and sympathy ; it timed the first con- 
senting steps of the earliest social groups, 
taught them in part the secret of coherence 
and unity and communal life, and will time 
the steps of poetry so long as poetry shall 
continue to voice the emotions of social man. 
But it is not the power, or essence, or soul 
of poetry ; nor can that power, essence, 
soul, be explained in terms of the art of 
poetry alone. Taine, materialist and monist 
that he was, made one of the body and 
the soul, and expressed soul in terms of body. 
He tried to account for the whole of poetry 
by causes which really account for the poetic 



WHITMAN AND TAINE 147 

art and not for poetic genius. Yet his failure 
in the high places must not cancel his success 
upon the field ; and precisely this success upon 
the field is what modern critics ignore. The 
genius of the poet is secure, an eternal theme ; 
the art which springs from communal origins 
is perpetually denied or thrust out of sight. 
We leave, therefore, that citadel, that haunt of 
genius, unassailed ; and we turn to the actual 
territory which belongs of right to the demo- 
cratic idea. With one the critic is chiefly con- 
cerned ; with the other, historians and the 
student who deals with the functions of poetry 
in human life. So in the great art of statecraft 
it is well for a biographer, for a critic, who is 
chiefly busied with the highest problems of 
national and international policy, to go straight 
to the exponent of some favourite cause, to 
Caesar, to Alfred, to Cavour, to Bismarck. But 
if one is to study the science of government 
as a human institution, and not merely as the 
arena where genius has won its triumphs, then 
the scholar comes by very slow steps, if at all, 
to Bismarck, Cavour, Alfred, Csesar. They do 



148 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

not really interest him; they are not the ini- 
tial, not even the decisive elements in the pro- 
blem. So criticism, which is the valuation and 
history of poetry as an achievement, is impa- 
tient to reach its Homer, its Sophocles, its 
Shakespeare, as soon as it can ; but the student 
of poetry as a social art, an institution, an ele- 
ment in human life, must turn to democratic 
and communal origins, and follow the com- 
munity as it struggles from lower to higher 
stages of culture with something of that in- 
terest with which one follows the heroic ten 
thousand as they make their way up to the 
sea. To the significance of this struggle are 
devoted the remaining lectures of our course. 



IV 

THE FUNCTIONAL OKIGINS OF POETRY 

If literature, by Hettner's well-known defini- 
tion, is the record of ideas, to attempt the his- 
tory of literature is trying to get the shadow of 
a shadow. Not very long since, a publisher 
of great experience and success declared that 
the history of English literature could be writ- 
ten so keenly, so dramatically, that the book 
would outsell the most popular fiction; and 
when he was asked for his proof, he pointed 
to the enormous sales, both initial and contin- 
ued, of certain histories of England, of the 
English people. The comparison was lament- 
ably imperfect. Literature is itself a record, 
a document, motionless, while the history of a 
people can be reflected in a series of moving 
pictures ; and if this be adroitly done, it will 
satisfy two of the profoundest desires of the 
public, who wish to know how great men look 
and what common men do. Readable accounts 



150 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

of literature, to be sure, take heed of these 
demands, and translate it either into "Lives 
of the Poets," or, with Taine, into lives of 
the people among whom it is produced. But 
this is obviously a history not of literature, but 
of its makers or of its conditions. Suppose, 
however, that one refuses to take "the record 
of ideas " as a definition of literature, looks 
not simply at its great achievements but at its 
entire contents, and regards it as an institution, 
as an element in man's social life, and suppose, 
for the present purpose, that one considers it 
in its oldest phase, the phase of poetry ; then, 
indeed, by leave of the modern spirit of science, 
even poetry can be studied as something which 
moves, changes, grows, and can therefore have 
its history. It must have its history. During 
the past hundred years our main desire in every 
field of human and natural activity has been 
to see how things grow. This may not have 
been the case in poetry to such a degree as in 
the other fields of research, and the habit of 
investigation was acquired in poetics reluct- 
antly and late ; but it has come, and it stays. 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 151 

There was good matter in the writings of what 
may be called the exclamatory school ; but the 
idea of advancing knowledge has now over- 
taken and passed the idea of expressing interest 
in poetry. Lectures like those of Professor 
Murray on the Rise of the Greek Epic, like 
those of Professor Ridgeway, 1 which undertake 
to show that Greek tragedy began with games 
and songs at the funeral, point out the schol- 
ar's most profitable path; and while a hearty 
welcome must await such comment and appre- 
ciation as the Oxford professor of poetry has 
bestowed in his recent volume upon Hellenic 
verse, in ninety-nine other books of this sort 
the comment and the appreciation turn into 
a tiresome falsetto of praise. Method, too, as 
well as object is indicated in poetics by the 
scientific habit of the day. One gathers the re- 
lated facts, nothing being counted common or 
unclean, studies the relations, explains higher 
by lower forms, sets the whole group in order, 
and tries to ascertain the controlling principle 

1 The Origin of Tragedy, with Special Reference to the Greek 
Tragedians^ Cambridge, 1910. 



152 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

of growth, yet bearing ever in mind that the 
material of poetry is quite different from 
the material with which the chemist or the bio- 
logist has to deal. You cannot put poetry into 
retorts and test-tubes, you cannot dissect it 
and tell all its organs ; and although you can 
reconstruct this and that vanished species of 
poetry out of the survivals still at hand, just 
as naturalists do with fossils, yet, since it is 
impossible to throw primitive poems on a 
screen as if they were dinosaurs or pterodactyls, 
and prove them by sight of the eye, few readers 
will believe in them for your pains. What can 
be done and must be done in the scientific study 
of poetry is to watch it in its habit, note all 
the phases of its activity, and so determine its 
function. To my mind, this is the most im- 
portant lesson to be learned from the natural 
sciences and applied to the study of verse. Dar- 
win once said that M. Fabre, the entomologist, 
was the greatest of all observers in the realm 
of nature ; * and the secret of M. Fabre's observ- 
ation, as he now tells it in such a fascinating 

1 See p. 66, above. 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 153 

way, is that he has made the function, and 
not the organ, basis of his classification, while 
to watch the habits and determine the instincts 
of the living creature has seemed to him more 
fruitful of results than dissection of the dead 
body. This idea should always be applied to 
the study of poetry. Rhythm, for example, 
means motion ; yet too often we study rhythm 
by chopping a motionless, dead verse into sec- 
tions, and think that the process is science, 
while Herder's famous advice to read Homer 
as if he were singing in the streets is set 
down as romantic gush. But it is really the 
better science. In practice, too, the function of 
poetry itself can be atrophied, to a very great 
extent, by the deliberate suppression of its 
rhythmic purpose when it is read aloud, — and 
it is read aloud far too little in these days, — 
with a consequent loss of the most effective out- 
ward appeal of the art. It has been well said 
that one does not begin to appreciate Latin 
verse until one has read it aloud and caught 
the immense importance of its " sonority." 
Moreover, there is a hint for closer observation 



154 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

o£ the function in our historical and compar- 
ative task. 

In studying the body of poetry, we are wont 
to regard first of all matter and subject; and so, 
conveniently enough, we divide into epic, dra- 
matic, lyric. For purposes of classification this is 
essential ; but when we begin to ask how the 
various sections grew, where and how they 
began, and through what stages they passed, 
we find ourselves hampered and frequently 
quite foiled in our search simply because we 
assume the persistence and rigidity of this 
material division from the beginning to the 
end. Nor is that all. A dramatic development 
is found, let us say, — as Professor Bidgeway 
asserts of Hellenic tragedy, — at the funeral 
of a chieftain or a king; and the beginnings of 
poetry are therefore assumed to be dramatic. 
Another scholar is on the trail of epic ; presently 
he discovers that the germs of epic are also 
to be sought in ancient eulogies of the dead, 
and so he announces epic as the oldest form of 
verse. Next comes a capable person who as- 
sumes lyric as the poetic protoplasm, spends a 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 155 

hundred pages or so in argument of the acut- 
est sort to determine whether poetry sprang 
in the first instance from a full stomach or from 
an empty heart, and at last, deciding for the 
pathetic cause, hales all shreds and scraps of 
lyric antiquity to the sepulchre, announcing 
final discovery of the source. How often and 
in how many places that ultimate source of 
poetry has been discovered ! Par better, it 
seems to me, are the results of investigation 
when one abandons for primitive times this 
rigidity of division by subject-matter, this 
search for an ultimate source and a single origin 
of species, and when one undertakes to follow 
the expression of grief into whatever regions 
of poetry it may invade, — follow, that is, the 
function of poetry in expressing a distinct 
emotion common to mankind under certain 
conditions and experience of life. All early 
verse was spoken and heard, vanishing in 
course of time from human memory ; but the 
functions of poetry in that formative period 
have often come upon record, or else may be 
inferred from cumulative evidence of many 



156 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

times. Again, there are good results to be 
gained from the study of a definite poetic or 
rather rhythmical form, irrespective of its 
emotional origins and of its emotional appeal, 
an essay, if I may use the big word, in morpho- 
logy. When the storm of criticism and reaction 
a few decades ago made havoc of comparative 
philology, it was found that while the stately 
edifice of oldest Aryan civilization, built up 
with words common to all the dialects, lay in 
a shapeless mass of ruin, the foundation walls, 
so to speak, of grammatical forms and inflec- 
tions still stood intact. In like manner, form 
and structure of verse survive in poetry, while 
the actual matter of it changes with the shifts 
and doublings of human interest from genera- 
tion to generation. Let us make, then, a short 
essay in each of the methods of investigation 
named just now, a study in emotional function 
and a study in form, before turning to our 
actual subject. 

For such along historic look, some function 
of the art should be found, as old as may be 
and still active, where the facts are sure, their 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 157 

application is evident, and the passage from 
lower to higher forms is fairly susceptible of 
proof. In the point of age, as we have just 
noted, it is probable that poetry, like so many 
other arts and institutions of life, had no sin- 
gle starting-point, but rather a plurality of ori- 
gins. Setting aside, therefore, all claims of the 
funeral as ultimate and single source, one of 
those scattered starting-points in poetry may 
safely be set down as the social or communal 
pang of death. I say social, not private and 
personal, not as if the intimate word of grief, 
like Emerson's beautiful threnody for his son, 
had gradually passed abroad and had come to 
public uses as well as public hearing, which 
is really a reversal of the process, but social ; 
and I say this for the good reason that poetry 
is essentially a social art, and communication, 
its vital and genetic fact, already supposes 
community. Moreover, to simplify the task, we 
must leave out the elements of magic, fetich- 
ism, and incipient priesthood, all of which had 
more or less to say to the development of the 
formal dirge, and we must look at this devel- 



158 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

opment mainly as the composition of social and 
artistic forces. Now the most vivid experience of 
the scarce formed, laboriously cohering horde, 
would be its partial disruption by death, the 
snapping of a cord in the communal bands, 
and this would force a common utterance of 
grief on the part of the survivors. Never alone 
did the mourner sigh then, but with " a gen- 
eral moan." That is, expression of social feel- 
ing would spring from social loss. Assuming 
also with development of the social group, and 
with the tardy appearance of personality, some 
kind of closer kinship, it seems natural to think 
of the personal grief finding outlet first by 
blending with the common moan, and later by 
individual effort ; so that when such an utter- 
ance of anguish came at last upon record of 
any sort, it had two elements, one personal, as 
of the next of kin, or of the closest in com- 
panionship, and one choral, still loud with the 
rhythmic moaning of the throng. The former 
element steadily waxes, and the latter steadily 
wanes. Though the coronach long echoed so- 
cial and tribal sorrow, and though even now 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 159 

in remote villages and the country-side one can 
still find this community of mourning and 
a general obligation to weep with them that 
weep, the personal note has grown more and 
more distinct. This most ancient poetic func- 
tion has everywhere become an individual and 
reasoned farewell to the dead, whether simple, 
transient, conventional, or whether profound, 
memorable, melodious, the voice of genius at 
its highest pitch. Genius in simplicity is of 
course most effective, as with the incomparable 
lines of Catullus to his brother; the function, 
however, leads from all quarters of poetic ex- 
pression up the great heights of song. 

But now I raise my hand to greet the dead, 

And pour out songs of death with streaming eyes, 1 

says Adrastus in the Suppliants of Euripides; 
and this same tragedy, highly developed as its 
art must seem, holds all the old elements of 
choral wailing, the gesture, the dances even, 
praise of the dead heroes, and swift allusion to 
their deeds. Songs of death can be heard in 
faint tradition out of the dawn of poetry, and 

1 Suppliants, tr. Way, 772 f . 



160 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

can be read in the noblest and final energy 
of all the noblest poets. 1 Totavitaphilosophi 
commentatio mortis, says Cicero ; but it is as 
true of the poet. 

Clearly, then, in this long trail of threnody, 
cry, naenia, vocero, 2 elegy, dirge, — whatever 
the name and whatever the occasion, — there 
is a chance to see how things grow in poetry 
and with very little opportunity of mistake, at 
least in the earlier stages; for one is deal- 
ing with a primary instinct and with universal 
experience. One sees, too, the help and the in- 
citement given to these studies by the demo- 
cratic idea; in a sense not intended by the poet, 

Thersites' body is as good as Ajax' 
When neither are alive, — 

and Shakespeare himself gives a villain one 
of the finest dirges ever sung. The simplest 
lament is paired with the most elaborate. For 

1 Sophocles, (Ed. Col. , Lucretius, de Rerum Natura, con- 
clusion of Book in ; Shakespeare in his deep note always ; 
and the evidence of that most read English poem, Gray's 
Elegy. 

2 Corsican name for the " cry " or chant of grief, sung by 
the widow, or sister, or daughter, of the dead man. 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 161 

one can watch poetry here in its function of 
emotional and sympathetic utterance at a point 
where both instinctive human emotion, and 
the sympathy which springs from social 
union, are at their keenest. And now let us 
turn from theory to some of the recorded 
facts. 

All over the world, in all times of which we 
have knowledge, the humblest as well as the 
highest folk have buried or burned or in what- 
ever way deserted their dead with cries of 
grief, where the hysteric rhythm is often timed 
by the emotions and steps of the chief mourner 
and by the wailings and gestures and actual 
dance of the choral and communal throng. 
The cry, doubtless at first what an observer 1 
in West Africa terms it, "a song in moans," 
soon took meaning, as it often does with these 
Africans, and then passed into a fourfold for- 
mula which recurs, now as a whole, now in 
part, with amazing regularity, in every time 
and place. The full formula would include the 
fact of death, — mostly in interjectional out- 

1 Nassau, Fetichism in West Africa, 1904, p. 221 f. 



162 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

bursts, — the reminiscence, the question, the 
appeal. "Alas, thou art gone!' 3 And then, 
"How brave, good, strong, thou wert! " And 
again, "Why didst thou go? What had we 
done? What was thy lack?" And finally, 
" Come back to us." Laments of this kind, and 
almost as brief in terms, — repetition made 
them endless, — could be brought in evidence 
from the lower stages of culture in all lands 
and times of which ethnology has made note. 
Frequently, however, only the cry, contracted 
into a refrain, and the reminiscence, expanded 
to a poem, are retained in the course of art- 
istic development. The question holds mainly 
with peasants in its crude form; while the ap- 
peal to return, often crossed by considerations 
of magic and ritual, as where the survivors do 
all they can to keep the spirit from coming 
back and block every avenue of access, is 
either omitted in Christian times or converted 
into another phrase, a phrase of hope. 

Development is general ; but there are eddies 
in the current. Often the " cries " were forbid- 
den because of their violence and the accom- 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 163 

panying excesses, as by precept of Plato and 
by law of Solon, or by statute, as in Gascony in 
the fourteenth century, or, for more elaborate 
elegy, by an Act of Henry IV, 1 which ordered 
that " rhymers, minstrels, and vagabonds" 
should not be maintained in the land of Wales 
to make "kymorthas" — that is, death-songs, 
— "upon the common people there." Pruning, 
too, is often as interesting as growth ; for wild 
cries and iterated moans are soon felt to be 
artificial, and the hired mourner, mostly a wo- 
man, comes at last into disrepute. Her art, 
however, as among the mourning women 2 of 
Israel, often developed the choral and spon- 
taneous cry of grief over the dead into an 
elaborate and remembered verse of lament. 
Thus Budde points out the halting but highly 
effective rhythm of such lamentation as is pre- 
served by Jeremiah, 3 where the khia, preceded 

1 C. xxvn. See Wales During the Tudor Period, J. B. 
Nevins, p. 10. 

2 Men are included in those who made lament for Josiah. 
See 2 Chron. xxxv, 25, where the passage of improvisation into 
literature is described. 

3 ix, 17 ff. 



164 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

by an appeal to the mourners, is chanted for 
Jerusalem in quite ennobled form : — 

Call for the mourning women that they may come, 

And send for the cunning women that they may come. . . . 

. . . Yet hear the word of the Lord, O ye women, 

And let your ear receive the word of his mouth, 1 

And teach your daughters wailing, 

And every one her neighbour lamentation. 

For death is come up into our windows, 

It is entered into our palaces. 
To cut off the children from without, 

And the young men from the streets. . . . 

Elaborate, too, and traditional, although 
likewise developed from the Jcma, is the tri- 
umphal "ode" over Babylon, 2 — a "taunt- 
song " against the Babylonian King, an in- 
verted dirge : — 

How still the Oppressor has grown, — 

Stilled, too, the insolent ragings ! . . . 

How art thou fallen from heaven, 

O Lucifer, Son of the Dawn ! . . . 

1 " Yahweh will Himself teach them the lamentation [which 
they often improvised], and these women are to hand it down 
to their daughters (cf. 2 Sam. i, 18). " — A. S. Peake, D.D. 

2 Isaiah, xiv, 4-22. I use the translation of Mr. G. H. Box. 
For all these cases see Budde, " Das hebraische Klagelied," 
Zeits. f. alttest. Wissensch., n, 26 f ., and " Die hebraische Lei- 
chenklage," Zeits. des deutsch. Palastina-Vereins, vi, 181 ff. 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 165 

Another of these " taunt-songs" represents 
Babylon fallen from her queendom to the state 
of the slave : — 

Sit silent, enter into darkness, 

O maiden Chaldsea ! 
For no longer shalt thou be called 

The mistress of kingdoms. . . . 

but is still in the rhythm of the kina. This 
inversion of the lament as a triumphant and 
taunting choral of the victors, of the specta- 
tors, of the earlier victims, is a very natural 
process; it could be traced far back in time 
and over very wide spaces of the world. Thus 
an ancient Hebrew song is recorded in the 
twenty-first chapter of the book of Numbers, 
telling of the overthrow of the enemy. " They 
that make taunt-songs," — in the authorized 
version "they that speak in proverbs," — 
say : — 

Woe to thee, Moab ! 

Thou art undone, O people of Chemosh. . . . 

It is " thou " instead of the choral " I " or 
"we" of the actual dirge. Such taunt-songs 
were made after the battle of Bannockburn 



166 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

" in daunces, in the carols of the maidens and 
minstrels of Scotland : — 

Maydens of Englande sore may you mourne 
For your lemmans ye have lost at Bannockisburn, 
With heve-a-lowe . . ." 

But the consciousness of parody upon the 
direct dirge for the fallen warriors is here 
very faint, and the chronicle which records 
this taunt-song can be taken only as witness 
of the custom, not of the actual composition. 
There can be no doubt, however, in regard 
to the custom itself, its ancient origins, and its 
vogue. We come back to the lament itself, 
to the primitive cry. 

In spite of law and changes in custom, the 
wild inarticulate cry, mainly of the chorus, 
held long and holds in survival; it is what 
Lear demands for his dead Cordelia; and 
Sievers 1 even derives the good old English 
word for song or lay, often used of funeral 
laments, — leo^, — from the howling as of 
wild beasts. Dunstan, who is said, moreover, 

1 Beitrage, xxix, 315 f . — " Howl, howl, howl, howl "... 
is Lear's appeal to the bystanders. 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 167 

to have been fond of the heathen naeniae or 
dirges, heard "the death-howl of the women 
about the court" where King Eadred lay in 
state. 1 The unrestrained grief of the "wake" 
is familiar to the present day. But taking the 
broad chronology of evolution, it is clear that 
such cries and howls, always rhythmic both 
in their personal and hysteric fashion, and in 
their concerted and choral effect, soon came 
under a kind of artistic control and took on a 
definite meaning. Padelf ord 2 notes that there 
are nine distinct words for "funeral-song" 
preserved in Anglo-Saxon documents ; and 
legal prohibition of these laments throughout 
Europe, as they were prescribed by old heathen 
custom, heaps up the synonyms in a kind of 
eagerness to cover all the forms of such a per- 
sistent rite. The still surviving Syrian song of 
grief, chanted mainly by women, often con- 
sists of a single word, "woe" or "alas," not 
far removed from that "song of moans," and 
reminiscent of the words of the prophet Amos, 

1 955 a.d. Stubbs, Memorials of S. Dunstan, pp. 11, 58. 

2 0. E. Musical Terms, p. 15. 



168 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

" wailing shall be in all streets, and they shall 
say in all the highways, Alas, Alas ! ' But in 
the beautiful lament of David over Saul and 
Jonathan the appeal to the daughters of Israel 
is answered by their refrain, How are the 
Mighty Fallen ! — which contrasts with the 
personal note of " I am distressed for thee, 
my brother," and with the curse which is laid 
upon the place of slaughter: "Ye hills of 
Gilboa, be dewless." Here, moreover, and in 
the king's lament for Abner, where the people 
all " answer" in choral, just as they do in the 
Iliad at Hector's funeral, praise is added to 
the word of grief, and germs of epic as well 
as of drama are close at hand. 1 There is no 
mingling in this kind of dirge of the other 
elements of question and appeal ; and yet the 
simple combination of grief and praise 2 is the 

1 Here belong, of course, the prose of Malory's version of 
the lament over Lancelot, and the rhythm of Charles's fine 
burst of grief for Roland. 

2 The classical passage for the Roman praeficae says that 
they were employed ut etflerent etfortia facta laudarent. The 
lacerations and the tearing of hair in which they indulged 
came to be regarded as an abuse of their art. 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 169 

formula for some of the noblest elegiac poems, 
not only individual but national, lamenting 
even the lost cause, the banished people, the 
kingdom overthrown : such are the forbidden 
communal song of the Moors in Spain with 
the choral iteration of Woe is me, Alhama, 
and the incomparable beauty of the song of 
Hebrew captives by the rivers of Babylon. 
Nor is it a long step to the common dirge of 
our mortality, persistent theme of poetry in all 
times, and nowhere more effective than in 
the stately prose of the burial-service of the 
church. 1 The evolution of the vocero and of 
the coronach is more immediate. The story 
of the dead man's deeds is an obvious and 
early growth out of the simple lament, and min- 
gles, where the vendetta is in vogue, with the 
appeal for revenge ; but this immediate voice 
of passion sinks to silence in the record, unless 

1 The ultimate expression of the dirge is for the world, or 
the universe itself, as in those fine passages of Shakespeare 
(. . . " The great globe itself " . . .) and of Seneca (" hie 
aliquo mundus tempore nullus erit"); the latter may have 
been in the mind of the poet when he composed that scene 
of the Tempest. 



170 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

the deeds of vengeance have been very notable. 
The domestic lament, when it has become 
traditional, keeps little of the old feud-fury, 
and holds mainly to its pathetic tone. A 
traveller in Brazil three hundred years ago 
heard the Indian women lamenting their 
braves in almost the same terms as he had 
noted often in the burial cries of the Hugue- 
not women of Beam over their husbands, 
these in passionate rimes full of iteration, the 
others in short but repeated and harmonious 
phrase. Rarely preserved for their own sake 
and in their integrity, laments of the widow 
often find lodgement in some poem of larger 
intention, or else create for themselves, in 
course of tradition, a kind of epic covering. 
Such a lament, I think, is embedded in a 
mournful little traditional ballad, familiar to 
all lovers of popular verse, which fairly sings 
itself, and gives half in quotation, half in re- 
cord, the vocero of a Border widow; imagina- 
tion can supply the feud motive and the call 
to vengeance which a lapsing memory and 
a growing sentiment have suppressed. I use 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 171 

Motherwell's combination in this case for the 
reason that his use of the chorus surely re- 
stores old conditions. 

High upon Highlands and low upon Tay 
Bonnie George Campbell rade out on a day. 

Saddled and bridled and booted rade he ; 
Hame cam his guid horse, but never cam he. 

Out cam his auld mither greeting fu* sair, 

And out cam his bonnie bride riving her hair . . . 

My meadow lies green and my corn is unshorn, 
My barn is to build, and my babe is unborn. 

Saddled and bridled and booted rade he ; 
Toom 1 hame cam the saddle, but never cam he. 

Not unlike this moan of the Highland widow 
over her helplessness, so consonant with rude 
Border life that no echo of the classics need 
be assumed, is the lament, with dreary fore- 
cast for the future, of the widow of Beo- 
wulf : 2 — 

1 " Empty." — In the original ballad, or rather ballads, 
both mother and widow had their lament ; and the chorus 
was surely not this epic summary of the text, but a more im- 
mediate echo and utterance of grief. 

2 B. 3150. The text has been restored by Bugge, but is 
probably right. 



172 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

Wailing her woe, the widow old, 
her hair unbound, for Beowulf's death 
sang in her sorrow, and said full oft 
she dreaded the doleful days to come, 
deaths enow and doom of battle, 
and shame. — 

So much for the more intimate lament of the 
widow, drifting down with increasing narra- 
tive elements of traditional ballad or epic ; 
from that day when the solitary were first set 
in families, widows held primacy among all 
mourners, and a time of social anarchy finds 
its utmost expression in the fact that widows 
of slain men "made no lamentation/' * A 
wider grief, as of the clan, and of even re- 
moter origins, is found in the lament for the 
Earl of Murray, a ballad founded on fact. 
Again, not in accord with the letter of the 
law, I use the version from Ramsay's Tea- 
Table, Miscellany , because the epic of the ac- 
tual lament is so admirably marked off from 
the other epic accretion. In both ballads one 
hears the throb of the rhythm and almost 
the swaying and timing of a funeral dance; 

1 Psalm lxxviii, 64. 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 173 

but here the opening appeal is to the people at 
large, the lament is choral and in incremental 
repetition, and the vocero of the widow is 
hinted, not reported, at the end. — 

Ye Highlands, and ye Lawlands, 
Oh where have you been ? 
They have slain the Earl of Murray, 
And they layd him on the green, 

" Now wae be to thee, Huntly ! l 
And wherefore did you sae ? 
I bade you bring him wi' you, 
But forbade you him to slay.' 1 

He was a braw gallant, 
And he rid at the ring ; 
And the bonny Earl of Murray 
Oh he might have been a king ! 

He was a braw gallant, 
And he play d at the ba' ; 
And the bonny Earl of Murray 
Was the flower amang them a\ 

He was a braw gallant. 
And he playd at the glove ; 
And the bonny Earl of Murray, 
Oh he was the Queen's love ! 

1 This is said by the King. — James Stewart, Earl of 
Murray, who was killed by the Earl of Huntly 's men in 
1592, was " handsome, strong, and exceedingly popular." 






174 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

Oh lang will his lady 
Look o'er the Castle Down, 
Eer she see the Earl of Murray 
Come sounding thro the town ! 

We found that the lament of the widow in 
the ballad was matched by a similar case in the 
oldest English epic ; and from the same Beo- 
wulf comes a hint, perhaps even a transcript, 
of the sorrow of the clan, with the same fore- 
boding of woe for the community that the 
widow just now feared for herself. The ele- 
ments of lamentation in our epic are very 
significant; one could almost weave into a 
single threnody the actual funeral song sung 
by the twelve noble young clansmen as they 
ride round the barrow, the vocero of the 
widow already quoted, and this voluntary, so 
to speak, of the messenger, — a dirge in ad- 
vance of the funeral. 1 " Now haste is best," 
he says, after giving the details of the chief- 
tain's last battle, and outlining the dangerous 
feud with these neighbour tribes which Beo- 
wulf has so long held in check, — 

i B. 3007. 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 175 

11 Now haste is best 
that we go to gaze on our Geatish lord, 
and bear the bountiful breaker-of -rings 
to the funeral pyre. No fragments merely 
shall burn with the warrior. Wealth of jewels, 
... all of that booty, the brands shall take, 
fire shall eat it. No earl must carry 
memorial jewel. No maiden fair 
shall wreathe her neck with the noble ring. 
Nay, sad in spirit and shorn of her gold 
oft shall she pass o'er paths of exile 
now our lord all laughter has laid aside, 
all mirth and revel. Full many a spear 
morning-cold shall be clasped amain, 
lifted aloft ; nor shall lilt of harp 
those warriors wake ; but the wan-hued raven 
fain o'er the fallen, his feast shall praise, 
and boast to the eagle how bravely he ate 
when he and the wolf were wasting the slain. ..." 

The clan's lament actually passes into a pro- 
phetic lament for the clan, ending with the 
characteristic poetic touches of a battle-scene, 
the carrion-birds and the wolf. 1 The whole 

1 We can carry the cynical Twa Corbies back from parody 
to the tender lament it has displaced, The Three Ravens) 
behind that lies the last vocero of the faithful leman, the 
"fallow doe" of the ballad. But are the ravens of that old 
Germanic stock ? And Professor Child's phrase, Ballads, I, 
253, " a cynical variation of the tender little English ballad " 
can hardly be replaced by " a taunt-song made on the model 



176 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

epic, in fact, abounds with passages that give 
some hint or echo of the funeral. Scyld's 
boat-burial opens the poem ; and Beowulf's 
barrow looms up in the mists as we close. 
Two widows mourn over their husbands ; and 
there seem to be, so to speak, twin forms of 
the paternal dirge, as when Hrethel now 
"makes a rime, a sorrow-song for his son/' 
apparently the public vocero, and now "goes 
to his chamber, a grief-song chants alone for 
his lost." The last of the clan recites a noble 
dirge for his race ; and there are many other 
shreds and fragments of threnody. Moreover, 
like all English verse, like the lyric of its own 
day, whenever the oldest English epic comes 
into traffic with mortality, it takes fresh energy 
of phrase and rhythm, and gains a kind of 
certitude in its art. Perhaps even the ethical 
swa sccel passages, 1 — " heed examples and be 

of an old dirge." The possibility of the process is all that 
can be affirmed. 

1 Such as Beowulf, 20 ff., after eulogy of Scyld's son. Such 
a passage, Guthlac, 315 ff., follows eulogy of the saint ; and 
there are many other cases in oldest English. It is of course 
the haecfabula docet ; yet it is by no means due to " monkish 
scribes." The pagan German was fond of didactics. 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 177 

wise/' — are derived from some kind of dirge. 
One sees at any rate how this eulogy of the 
epic part shoulders its way into the lament, 
just as elegy and eulogy tend elsewhere to 
become convertible terms and give ground 
for the satiric summary of " hie jacet and a 
hundred lies." 

Returning to the full pattern, however, of 
that primitive lament, it is time to close ac- 
counts with its growth from earliest forms, the 
homely cry of woe, the wonder, the query, 
the memorial praise, the appeal and word 
of hope, up into the high places of myth and of 
poetry. The background, as I pointed out, is 
social, for a broken tie means precedent union ; 
hence come the chorus of grief, still surviving 
in Corsica, and that ordered dance about the 
dead which caused the older funeral songs to 
be known by the Corsican people not only as 
lamenti but as hallati. The hint of hysteria, 
too, already noted, points along with the choral 
and the dance almost to origins, and certainly 
to earliest function, to the necessity of a rhyth- 
mical expression of grief ; and for the reach of 



178 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

evolution, it is not a negligible survival when 
one considers the widespread impulse, checked 
only in days of rational restraint, to put memo- 
rial verses on the tombstone or add them to 
the printed notice of death. Burlesque, that 
smiler with knife under cloak, is forever wait- 
ing round the corner for tragedy; and the 
obituary rhyme has become our most persist- 
ent and fatiguing form of humour. A glance, 
however, at Mr. Mackail's translations from the 
Greek anthology gives other ideas and makes 
the lapse of the old habit pathetic. For here, 
in exquisite poetical form, is the same old 
pattern of lament, the cry, the question, the 
memorial pride, the appeal, and, in perhaps 
one instance, hope. "This little stone, good 
Sabinus, is the record of our great friendship ; 
ever will I require thee ; and thou, if it is per- 
mitted among the dead, drink not of the water 
of Lethe for me." "For me" is in ifiot ; one 
would like to translate "drink not of Lethe 
till I come," and so, "till we meet again"; 
but that is perhaps too great a strain upon 
grammar in the interests of religion. At any 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 179 

rate, the wish and appeal are pathetic; a 
variation on that old cry "Come back to us!" 
There is no doubt, however, of the meaning 
of the appeal in a famous lament which is set 
to the celestial mood. Boatmen on the Nile, 
it is said, still chant the refrain of an ancient 
Egyptian cry, the Ai-en-Ise, Isis grieving for 
the lost Osiris. Now the primitive cries seemed 
to be unanswered and unanswerable ; but 
poetry, even in its humblest function, leaves 
such wintry fact wherever it may, and hails 
the promise of spring. Easter hope is nearly 
as old as human grief. The very insistence of 
this Egyptian appeal is warrant of belief in a 
favorable answer; the divine art will bring 
back Osiris, just as Ceres will find Proserpine, 
and as Ishtar will return from the land of 
death. Mortal threnody makes a different 
appeal and takes another promise, witness that 
noble close of Lycidas in full note of faith, 
varying the theme, "I shall go to him, but he 
shall not return to me"; witness the faint and 
fugitive hope of the noblest Roman of them 
all in his lament for Agricola; witness the 



180 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

humble but affecting scene 1 among remote 
German peasants of the present day, when 
first the wife, then the sons, last the daughters, 
sing each a farewell to the dead, ending each 
with the refrain, Buhe wohl bis auf den lieben 
jiingsten Tag ! — But here is the Ai-en-Ise; 
remarkable no less for its form than for its 
matter, called a lyric, but functionally to be 
set down with many a proud piece of epic and 
of dramatic art. 

"Come back, come back, God Panu, come 
back! For they which were against thee are 
no more. Ah, fair helper, come back to see 
me, thy sister, that love thee; and drawest 
thou not nigh to me? Ah, fair youth, come 
back, come back! I see thee not; my heart is 
sore for thee, my eyes seek thee. I wander 
about for thee, to see thee in the form of Nai ; 
to see thee, to see thee, fair lord, in the form 
of Nai; to see thee, the fair one — to see thee, 
to see thee, God Panu, the fair one! Come to 
thy darling, blessed Ounophris, come to thy 
sister, come to thy wife; come to thy wife, 

1 Meyer, Deutsche Volkskunde, p. 272. 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 181 

God Urtuhet ; come to thy spouse ! I am thy 
sister, I am thy mother, and thou comest 
not to me; the face of gods and of men is 
turned to thee, while they weep thee, seeing me 
that weep for thy sake, that weep and cry to 
heaven that thou hear my prayer, — for I am 
thy sister that loved thee on earth. Never lov- 
edst thou another than me, thy sister! Never 
lovedst thou another than me, thy sister ! " l 

Like the companion lament of Nephthys, 
this is distinctly a vocero of the sister over 
the brother; and the repeated maa-nehra, 
"come home," the refrain of the piece, gave 
rise to the name Maneros, fabled to be a prince 
of Egypt, a fact which reminded Herodotus of 
the similar song of Linos in Greece. 

We began this little study with the inarticu- 
late lament of a primitive horde, and we leave 
it with a celestial projection of the persistent 
formula of grief ; a review of all the other 
available facts would only deepen the im- 
pression made by such cases as have been 
cited here. The growth of poetry should not 

1 From the German translation of Brugsch. 



V 



182 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

be regarded as mere differentiation of simple 
forms. It was probably a series of combina- 
tions and dissolutions of the various poetic 
functions, each of which had its own line of 
development in a greater perfection of work- 
ing and in a wider range. The black threads 
of this lament run hither and thither through 
the growing texture of poetry; but there are 
other strands as well. It is found in all kinds 
of poem, simple and complex, small and 
great ; but we are not to trace all kinds of 
poem to the lament. If we could follow the 
poetry of birth, of marriage, of that ritual 
which, as now among the Central Australians, 
makes the ceremony over youths attaining 
manhood an almost continual choral and com- 
munal song, if we could trace poetry in its 
play-function and gymnastics, in its wisdom- 
verses, its riddles, its flytings, in its educative 
function and in its religious rites, we should 
doubtless find all these strands also working 
into epic, dramatic, and lyric patterns. 

Let us turn now from matter to form. Form 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 183 

is really older than matter in the development 
of poetry, which, in its early days, was as re- 
sponsive to external impulse and as fluid as 
the sea. There is no doubt, moreover, that 
a distinct species of poetry has been created 
by the evolutions of a definite form ; and had 
this kind of growth been studied in its true 
bearings, I think that there would have been 
no ballad question, so called, to vex the schol- 
ar's mind. 

In all the primitive cases of the threnody, a 
monotone or repetition is to be noted ; and 
the repeated cry itself, even the desolate wail- 
ing of Isis, floats, if one may use such a com- 
parison, in the sustaining and surrounding 
and undulating chorus of communal grief. 
As the threnody passes into artistic control, 
the chorus is abandoned, or is represented by 
a refrain ; while even repetition is curbed, and 
finally seems little more than a device of dic- 
tion, as in the opening lines of Lycidas. In 
certain other kinds of poetry, however, re- 
petition remains as an essential part of the 
rhythmic pattern, a survival, as in Hebrew 



184 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

parallelism, and in that " variation " pointed 
out by Heinzel as a mark of poetical style in 
the Sanskrit Vedas as well as in our own Ger- 
manic verse. It can become artificial to a de- 
gree, as in the interlaced quatrains of certain 
folksongs, and in the forms of verse devel- 
oped by fourteenth-century France, — ballade, 
roundel, and the rest ; but in its beginnings 
it is instinctive and spontaneous, the broadly 
social basis of all poetry. We may study this 
phase of poetic form to best advantage by 
comparing its successive stages in a very in- 
teresting kind of narrative poetry. The easiest 
way to tell a story in verse, when this verse is 
mainly repetition, when the singing is largely 
choral, and when the situation is so simple 
that much of it is given by gestures and fig- 
ures of the dance, is to make a slight change, 
an addition or increment, in each repetition of 
a stanza, as corresponding to the change and 
the advance in this chanted and acted story. 
The Descent of Ishtar, to be sure, is by no 
means primitive and instinctive verse ; it was 
one of the " books" in the royal library of 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 185 

Babylon ; but it has a passage l of extra- 
ordinary interest on account of this incre- 
mental form in its simplicity of narrative 
and dialogue. Ishtar is taken into the under 
world. 

Into the first gate he led her and took away the great 
tiara from her head. 

" Wherefore, keeper of the gate, dost thou take away the 
great tiara from my head ? " 

"Come within, O lady! The Lady of the Earth, — lo ! 
these are her laws." 

Into the second gate he led her, and took away the jewels 
from her ears. 

" Wherefore, keeper of the gate, dost thou take away the 
jewels from my ears ? " 

" Come within, O lady, The Lady of the Earth, these are 
her laws." 

So, then, with necklace, ornaments of the 
breast, girdle, jewelled clasps upon hands and 
feet, and bodice ; seven sets of three verses 
each describe the spoiling of Ishtar as she is 
brought before the goddess of the under 
world. But Ishtar is set at liberty ; and the 
process is detailed in exact reversal. 

1 From the German of Jensen. 



186 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

Through the first gateway he led her out, and gave her 
back her bodice. 

Through a second gateway he led her out, and gave her 
back the jewelled clasps of hands and feet. 

Through a third gateway he led her out, and gave her 
back the girdle about her hips. 

Through a fourth gateway he led her out, and gave her 
back the ornaments of her breast. 

Through a fifth gateway he led her out, and gave her back 
the necklace about her neck. . . . 

And so follow the sixth and seventh verses, 
completing the reverse repetition; and the 
whole passage, even in its literary form, may- 
serve as the point of departure for a study of 
this rhythmic function of poetry. Develop- 
ment of narrative poetry out of repetition is 
an obvious process easily proved by the facts, 
and consists simply in a decrease of verbal 
repetition and a corresponding increase or 
substitution of the verbal increment. One 
finds, to be sure, repetition of a simple sort in 
the cante-fable, a late, artificial development, 
and in the far older marchen or popular tale 
in prose. But the main interest lies for us 
in the use of what I have called incremental 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 187 

repetition, 1 almost prevailingly in triads which 
correspond to those of the Ishtar fragment, 
as fundamental and primary fact, as forma- 
tive element, in the structure of the European 
ballad. It need cause no wonder to find this 
structure best preserved in a Scottish tradi- 
tional ballad, Babylon, or The Bonnie Banks 
of For die; although only a century and a 
half old in point of record, it is of an earlier 
narrative type than such Anglo-Saxon lays as 
Finnsburg, set down by the scribe a thousand 
years ago. The dramatic element in Babylon 
is far more vivid than in the Ishtar verses ; 
but dialogue and the incremental repetition 
are alike in the eastern and the western verse. 
Two sets of the three triads, with narrative 
chorus, may be quoted from the ballad. 

He *s taen the first sister by her hand 

And he 's turned her round and made her stand. 

1 Part of this study, with further development, was made 
in the president's address before the Modern Language 
Association in 1905, and was printed as Chapter I of The 
Popular Ballad, Boston, 1907. 



188 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

" It 's whether will ye be a rank robber's wife, 
Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife." 

" It 's I '11 not be a rank robber's wife, 
But I '11 rather die by your wee pen-knife." 

He 's killed this may, and he 's laid her by, 
For to bear the red rose company. 

He 's taken the second ane by the hand, 

And he 's turned her round and made her stand. 

" It 's whether will ye be a rank robber's wife, 
Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife." 

" I '11 not be a rank robber's wife, 
But I '11 rather die by your wee pen-knife." 

He 's killed this may, and he 's laid her by, 
For to bear the red rose company. 

The third triad brings discovery and climax; 
the murderous outlaw is brother to the three 
sisters. This incremental repetition, obviously 
related to movements of the dance and to 
the incipient drama or situation, is especially 
fitted to what may be called the relative 
climax, 1 — the summoning of friends or kin to 
some important action, the failure of this and 
that relative, and the final success — or it may 

1 For cases in various ballads of Europe, see the present 
writer's Popular Ballad, pp. 98, 102 ff. 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 189 

be failure also — of the nearest and dearest. 
In Sir Andrew Barton, where epic interests 
are predominant but where the situation still 
commands incremental repetition, this nearest 
and dearest is Sir Andrew himself, and the 
issue is tragic. It is the critical moment in a 
fight at sea, and the pirate, — Barton, — calls 
for a supreme effort. 

" Come hither to me, thou Gourden good, 
And be thou readye att my call, 
And I will give thee three hundred pound 

If thou wilt lett my beames downe ffall." 

With that hee swarved * the main-mast tree, 
Soe did he itt with might and maine ; 

Horsely, with a bearing arrow, 

Stroke the Gourden through the braine. 

And he ffell into the haches againe, 

And sore of his wound that he did bleed; 

Then word went throug Sir Andrew's men 
That the Gourden hee was dead. 

" Come hither to me, James Hambliton, 

Thou art my sister's sonne, I have no more; 
I will give thee six hundred pound 

If thou wilt lett my beames downe ffall." 

With that he swarved the main mast tree, . . . 

1 Perhaps " swarmed," climbed. 



190 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

— only to meet the fate of the " Gourden" ; 
and Sir Andrew in the third triad — much dis- 
ordered in its present shape — fares no better, 
completing the series with a tragic climax. 

Now this glimpse of poetic morphology is 
of considerable importance in studying the 
growth of narrative verse out of instinctive 
and communal conditions into the reaches of 
art. For one finds that the epic element, so to 
speak, is accretional and explanatory, and has 
in many cases been added to the choral and 
dramatic nucleus. Epic material may come 
from any source. Thus a very beautiful bal- 
lad, found in sundry European variants, seems 
at first sight to tell the old story of Hero and 
Leander. But first sight is followed by first 
hearing; it is imperative that all old verse, 
particularly the ballads, should be read aloud, 
if not chanted ; and when this is done, it is 
clear that the bulk of the ballad is not the 
story of Hero and Leander, but a situation, 
which we may call "The Finding of the Body," 
in seventeen stanzas, made up entirely of in- 
cremental repetition and presenting a very 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 191 

narrow action in two scenes. Three stanzas of 
swift, unrepeated narrative give the Hero and 
Leander part of the story, and are little more 
than a versified title which the singer or re- 
citer added to his traditional matter. But 
there is neither hurry nor compact narrative 
in the rest, in the real ballad, so named not 
because it was sung at a dance, but because it 
was a dance, a dramatic situation, unchanged 
in bulk and place, but shifting its parts in 
tune with these until a climax is attained. The 
epic, on the other hand, is a journey, not a situ- 
ation ; and a very different form is developed 
for the purely narrative function of verse. To 
these examples, did time and space allow, 
could be added a situation sequence from 
Shetland, attached in some way to the Or- 
pheus story, and similar treatment of the 
original "situation " verses from Danish and 
Faroe ballads. The Ishtar passage, like and 
yet different, points to a situation sequence 
also ; but the origin and motive must be 
guessed, and may not be followed back, as 
in the easy inference for the ballad material, 



192 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

into a choral and dramatic expression. Ishtar, 
however, is the goddess of fertility, and her 
descent, as in so many related myths, seems to 
be an allegory of the sowing and growing of 
the seed, of the death and revival of nature ; 
whether some symbolic ritual is behind the epic 
recital, something like the seed-planting and 
reaping chorals of European peasants, or the 
obscure Salian ritual at Rome, must be left to 
the learned. But I am asking and trying to an- 
swer questions about the various functions of 
poetry, making conclusions about its earlier 
and lower forms by tracing backward the 
growth to higher forms, marking the tendency 
of the functions to blend and separate, and of 
the forms to harden into a mould which will 
take any material ; and the main result of this 
study in perspective is comparative certainty 
that the situation, the dramatic part, is the 
real donnee of a narrative poem in its earlier 
function. The poem does not in the first in- 
stance bring out the" plot," but the "plot' 3 
or situation makes the poem, and makes it 
by the agency of a peculiar rhythmic form. 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 193 

First of all, the situation is wrought by chorus 
and repetition into remembered verse, which 
is the nucleus of the poem ; when that is 
formed, it can sometimes exist for itself. In- 
deed, the making of a whole poem by choral 
improvisation out of this communal material 
has been proved by Professor Kittredge in the 
case of a traditional English ballad called The 
Hangman's Tree, still sung in the mountain 
district of North Carolina; it is really a 
climax from the start to the finish, and the 
" story " is whatever one chooses to imagine. 
Or, again, the dramatic unity of time is broken 
by what I have ventured to call by the ugly 
phrase of " Split Situation," * or else by a pro- 
logue of retrospect and an epilogue of prospect 
such as are found in The Great Silkie ballad, 
quoted elsewhere. 2 The situation is still dom- 
inant. But as the epic process goes on, this 
nucleus of the poem ceases to develop ; there 
is a waning of the choral elements; the re- 
frain is less insistent, and the actual chorus 
disappears, — in other words, to use the 

1 Popular Ballad, p. 90. 2 See below, p. 275. 



194: DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

charming French term, the " assistance" ceases 
to be really assistance and is a mute audience ; 
repetition is in everyway retrenched; and the 
familiar sets of three incremental stanzas, 
noted already in the Bonnie Earl of Murray, 
in Ishtar and in the ballads just quoted, are 
used only to mark the narrative climax or to ex- 
press a recurring situation. The poet or maker 
or artist, once indeterminate, then hidden in the 
throng, now steps out in full view. It is very 
clear that in this progress of the ballad, from a 
case like The Bonnie Banks of For die, almost 
primitive in construction though its record 
date from the eighteenth century, up to the 
really rapid and direct method of the best 
Robin Hood ballads, dating from the fifteenth 
century, we have one of the ways in which 
narrative verse grew to nearly perfect form. 1 
The study of actual facts in narrative verse 
confirms this a priori idea, but warrants a 

1 No account is taken here of the process from ballad to 
epic, so well discussed by Professor Ker, by Professor 
Heusler, by Professor Hart ; it is simply an outline of the 
growth of the epic element in the ballad itself. 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 195 

division, a classification, of the results of 
poetic function. We can call the epic, as re- 
cent writers have called it in terms of its origin 
and character, atavistic. x The drama begins, 
and long keeps its chief attributes, as a social 
and " environmental" affair. The lyric is in- 
dividual. 2 For epic and drama the artist shows 
his hand chiefly in the diction, the style, in 
what we call his artistic control of the poem ; 
but in nearly all cases he is simply elaborating 
some communal device. To him are due the 
pictorial and suggestive phrase and the daring 
metaphor, which gained for a poet in Eliza- 
beth's time the title primus verborum artifex, 

1 If an Italian labourer sees a thrilling accident, he tells 
of it at once as sheer climax, half in gesture and repetition 
of phrases. In retrospect of a year or so, he has details, 
names, place, what went before and after. At second-hand 
his children make a story of it ; and a clever raconteur will 
make it artistic. Transfer this colloquial prose to days when 
verse and chorus and gesture were the medium for commu- 
nication of interesting things, — as even now South-Sea 
Islanders often prefer to sing their news rather than say it, 
— and the process just described is natural enough. 

2 See Mackail, Lectures on Greek Poetry, London, 1910, pp. 
83 ff. 



196 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

but which are really improvements of primitive 
variation, the growth of that once timid and 
fugitive increment to its highest power. And 
we all know Shakespeare's way. " I have done 
evil, and lost my soul, only to get the crown 
for the sons of Banquo " is the prose of it; 
to make that vivid, Shakespeare uses the old 
communal art of repetition with such personal, 
flashing, calculated novelty, as to cause one 
to ignore the faded and ancient ground-pat- 
tern of repetition : — 

For Banquo's issue have I filed my mind, 

For them the gracious Duncan have I murdered, 

Put rancours in the vessel of my peace 

Only for them, and mine eternal jewel 

Given to the common enemy of man 

To make them kings, the seed of Banquo, kings ! 

To that estate repetition can come at the hands 
of the dramatic poet; and whoever has studied 
poetic forms knows in what infinite variety of 
artistic devices this originally simple choral 
function of poetry can be found, — knows 
also in what artistic diction it cannot be found. 
For the poet who is bent upon the most effect- 
ive form of narrative has no time for repetition ; 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 197 

witness Chaucer at his best, — and there is no 
better, — say in the Pardoner's Tale, when he 
shakes off the sermonizing and begins to tell 
his story. 

We come now to a third kind of effort to 
see how things grow in the field of poetry, 
and so to achieve a history of literature as well 
as of literary products. There was the growth 
of the threnody, and there were the diverg- 
ing growths of dramatic narrative and of 
simple narrative verse ; what of the poet him- 
self ? Not to meddle with too high concerns 
just now, suppose the question of minor poets. 
How did they grow ? They must not be ig- 
nored, and they cannot be eliminated by stat- 
ute as Horace undertook to do with them. A 
glance at the publishers' books for a century 
or so would refute one part of Horace's fam- 
ous assertion ; and indeed no part of it is 
really true, though it will be quoted to the 
crack of doom as very gospel. Mediocrity, he 
declares, is welcomed or tolerated in the law- 
yer, in the professions generally, but not in 



198 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

the poetic art, where gods, men and book- 
sellers forbid it. The family-doctor, let us 
say, has his rights beside the great specialist, 
but there is to be no room for the family- 
poet, for that humbler bard whom Longfellow 
at once praises and exemplifies in one of his 
most attractive poems. But the facts are 
against Horace. Poetry in what maybe called 
its direct social function contradicts the well- 
worn maxim at every turn ; and even criticism 
has been forced to recognize the point of view 
of the consumer, championed by Hennequin, 
as well as the point of view of the maker and 
the critic. What would one not give to have on 
file the various favourite poems, say, of Plu- 
tarch's men, just as one knows the favourite 
poems of Lincoln or General Wolfe ? I hold no 
brief for Longfellow or another ; but I insist 
on these ministrations of minor poetry as still 
an important function in our day, and of in- 
creasing range and significance as the steps of 
poetry are retraced. Here is no shattering 
of the thunder, no rending of the earthquake, 
but verse, in Bacon's phrase, that comes home 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 199 

to men's business and bosoms, verse, if you 
will, uncritically beloved, verse that one cuts 
out from a newspaper and is ready — though 
not so often in these times — to read aloud to 
a friend. Twenty-odd years ago Traill drew 
up his famous list of the minor English poets; 
there was fine dispute thereupon, and bandy- 
ing of neat epithets ; but no one called these 
poets negligible, or thought to abolish them. 
They were good craftsmen. Their verse was not 
mere " numbers ratified," but had "the ele- 
gancy, facility, and golden cadence of poesy." 
Along with this minor poetry, moreover, of 
which so much found its way to the home and 
the fireside, must be reckoned for present pur- 
poses what is called vers de societe, with wider 
range, and defined 1 as that "poetry of sen- 
timent which breaks into humour," where 
"emotion takes refuge in jest and passion 
hides itself in scepticism of passion." The 
whole range of magazine verse and occasional 
poems, current poetry, 2 so to speak, must be 

1 See Locker, Lyra Elegantiarum, London, 1867. 

2 No poetic phenomenon of the present day is so interest- 



200 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

included ; and also those striking and usually 
orphaned pieces, flotsam and jetsam of litera- 
ture, that are rescued by the random collector 
and pasted in scrap-books. Privately published 
verses, too, still drop from the press, mostly 
into oblivion; but " somebody loves them," 
and now and then they hold a pearl of price. 
Years ago a privately printed play called 
Nero was sent to me ; and in it were these 
lines spoken by the emperor as he looks upon 
the murdered Agrippina when she is brought 
before him robed and seated in state : — 

Her head droops with the weight of that bent brow, 
And her drawn lips think sullenly in death 
With the wide words of universal rule. 

Put the name of an Elizabethan dramatist to 
these verses, and few critics would protest. In 
the scrap-book of a friend I once saw a trans- 

ing as the accidental beginning and very great consequent 
vogue of the " poem in prose," — that is, printed as prose, 
for the metre is very regular — of Walt Mason, which was 
at first an accidental feature of a Kansas newspaper and is 
now published daily in a large number of newspapers to the 
desire and satisfaction of a host of readers. This is a " func- 
tion " of the art not to be neglected. 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 201 

lation, cut from some newspaper, of Victor 
Hugo's Ephebe, so magnificent in two of 
the stanzas that it seemed to turn the orig- 
inal to prose; and those English verses are 
absolutely unknown. Let them be unknown; 
yet such momentary and unheeded work shows 
the function of poetry to be sound and active; 
and not until this crop fails utterly need one 
fear the poetic famine so often announced, so 
inevitably postponed. 

Now it seems perfectly reasonable to regard 
all this minor poetry, the vers de societe, — 
which, by the bye, Locker insists " should seem 
to come from the man of the world rather 
than from the consecrated poet " and should 
not be " too poetical," — and the occasional 
verses, as a continuation of the same function 
that produced such a mass of improvised poetry 
under the more communal and more homo- 
geneous social conditions of the early days of 
song. The skolion at a Greek banquet, the im- 
provised staves at a Norse farmer's feast, the 
song-duels, such as appeared in classical Ama- 
bcean verse but can be still heard in their rude 



202 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

estate among the modern Eskimos, with a kind 
of middle stage in that riot of rhythmic abuse, 
" The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy/' and 
even the "new" song or stanza to the harp 
which Caedmon could not sing, — these were 
all part of the poetic habit which still flour- 
ishes in its social function, save for the differ- 
ence that spontaneity now waits a little upon 
leisure, and verse comes not quite as an echo 
of the event. The toastmaster, let us say, once 
called for some original verses from brother 
Caedmon; later, and with surer success, he 
called on Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

These are the minor poets, and the genera- 
tion of them is not difficult to trace. What of 
the higher mood ? It is generally conceded 
that choral poetry prevailed in the beginning 
of an art whose social origins are too clear 
for a denial of this choral preponderance. But 
almost from the outset, the man who knew 
how, the artist, was heard gladly by the throng ; 
and since skill that made folk wonder was 
thought to be a gift of the gods, or something 
acquired by magic, or the inheritance from a 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 203 

supernatural parent, the tradition of mystery 
soon adhered to the bard, and in latter days has 
turned into the cult of genius. Countless in- 
stances could be cited of this tradition. There 
is "the once prevalent belief/' recorded by 
Professor Ehys for the Welsh, " that if a man 
spent a night on the Merioneth Mountain, 
where the giant Idrys was thought to have 
his . • . seat, one would descend in the 
morning a bard or a madman." The fairies, 
too, gave this power ; and by the beautiful 
superstition of Norway and Sweden, it is 
the spirit of the waterfall who teaches men the 
art of song and music. In Sweden, one offers 
him a black lamb, but in Norway, a white kid ; 
then he "seizes the player's right hand, and 
swings it back and forth till blood spurts from 
the finger-tips. Now the 'prentice has learned 
his lesson, and can play so that the very trees 
will dance." 

The poet by divine gift and right is thus a 
part of the history of poetry. There, in the 
gray mist of origins, is the man who knows 
how, the singer who detaches himself, if only 



204 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

for a moment, from the choral of the throng, 
and makes his fellows mutes and audience to 
his act, makes them feel his poetic power, 
wonder at it, cast about to account for it, 
and assume it to be taken from the knees of 
the gods ; here, after all the ages of develop- 
ment, is the poet with his genius still sacred, 
still inexplicable save as heaven's own gift. 
Nor need one object to these explanations, 
which now, as then, are mere confession of 
psychological ignorance, any more than one 
objects to tales about the miraculous gift of 
song to Pindar, to Homer, to iEschylus, 
or that draught of Odin's mead which 
transformed the Norseman into a poet. It 
is all an amiable bit of symbolism veiling 
the undisputed but indefinite fact. Not to this 
does one object; it is the double standard, 
if I may so call it/ the double standard in 
poetics, against which one ought to make pro- 
test long and strong, — a doctrine which ex- 
plains the lower forms of poetry as absolutely 
different, not in degree only but in kind, from 
the higher functions of poetry, which permits 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 205 

no historic or other connection between the 
two, and which nevertheless defines the whole 
art in terms of that symbolism or allegory alone. 
An entirely different dialect is used when one 
speaks of the loftier region ; an unplumbed 
chasm sunders it from the lower; and most 
critics make the passage, as Dante crossed 
Acheron, in a swoon. We all know the land 
of mystery, through which critics are fain to 
guide us; but there are few if any historic 
trails. We all know that poetry in their eyes is 
not a social function ; it is a cathedral service. 
Mystery is at the heart of it, asking that faith 
which is imagination at its best, asking the 
thankful, the ecstatic, the unquestioning mood, 
where a worshipper never dreams of trails, 
or sources, or even of earthly parentage for 
the object of his worship. Listen a moment to 
some chanted words of the critic-priest. — 
" Shakespeare he is . . . and as being Shake" 
speare ... he uses the Grand Style as his 
Attendant Spirit. He says to it, ' Come/ and 
it comes ; he says to it, ' Go/ and it goes. . . . 
It is nearly as impossible to describe, meticu- 



206 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

lously, the constituents of its grandeur as to de- 
scribe those of the majesty of the sun itself." 1 
That is Professor Saintsbury's version of the 
ritual ; and it were best, when he pauses, 
to answer " Amen." One must not reply with 
any phrase about origins and popular verse ; 
all such matter is left outside of this fane, into 
which one passes from the traffic and dust of 
the street and from all sordid sights and 
sounds. Dim lights are here ; the music surges 
forth from unseen recesses ; and the voice of 
the priest, however the message now and then 
fall short of what it should be, however the 
chant lack that full sonorous note which has 
just been heard, comes nevertheless from con- 
secrated lips. Such is poetry of the cathedral 
service, or, as Emerson calls it, the " piety of 
the intellect " ; such is poetry as the masters 
of mystery would have it worshipped ; such is 
the poetry to which we all do homage, and 

1 " Shakespeare and the Grand Style," in Oxford Essays 
and Studies, 1910, pp. 132, 120. — The concluding paragraph, 
limiting worshippers of poetry to a very select few, is monu- 
mental. 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 207 

without which it were a vain thing to speak of 
poetry at all. Only the fool would profane the 
sanctities of this art. But where the double 
standard breaks down is in its refusal to acknow- 
ledge the beginnings and early stages of such 
a splendid consummation. It will keep the 
apex of the pyramid, and yet ignore the long 
and laborious ascent of the foundation and 
the middle courses. It sings Job's glorious 
song of the war-horse, with neck clothed in 
thunder, swallowing the ground with fierce- 
ness, answering the trumpets ; and will allow 
no ancestry, no development of these perfec- 
tions. It denies the right of scientific question. 
Conversely, it takes these ecstatic phrases from 
the ritual and makes them explain, as if in 
logical precision, the poetic process, and so 
pass as definitions of poetry, — a pernicious 
habit, which combines the hierophantic and 
the scientific, and leads not only to historic 
chaos, as if one should take that Merion vigil to 
explain the growth of the poetic art in Wales, 
but also to nonsense such as the inclusion of 
painting and sculpture and architecture in the 



208 DEMOCRACY AND FOETRY 

poetic class. By Stuart Mill's reckoning, the 
Wingless Victory should count as a poem; 
thought, form, metaphor, harmony, poetic in- 
spiration, — all are there. Shelley, as we know, 
answered Peacock's pessimistic essay on the 
" Four Ages of Poetry," and argued through 
a good part of his own " Defense" in a 
scientific and historical fashion; at last he 
drops argument, and breaks into noblest praise 
of the art. " Poetry is indeed something di- 
vine." • . . Great and memorable phrases fol- 
low one after the other, like sudden vistas 
caught from a mountain-top through rifts of 
the flying clouds. " Poetry redeems from de- 
cay the visitations of the divinity in man." I 
will repeat this devoutly in the ritual; but 
when it is thrust upon me as a scientific defi- 
nition of poetry, or as historic account of the 
great social art, I find it manifestly inadequate. 
How, then, is one to reconcile such a conflict 
of claims ? How can one join in that cathedral 
worship, accept the allegory of genius, and 
yet ignore the contention of the critic who 
would make this allegory account for all 



THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 209 

poetic art and progress ? Contradictory as the 
terms of the statement may seem, it is never- 
theless true that this mistake of the double 
standard is largely due to the prevailing mo- 
nistic conception of poetry itself. Monism tries 
to explain all the functions and activities 
of the art as a single force, and blunders into 
the double standard in the very act of asserting 
its own unity of plan. Admit, however, a sane 
dualism of origins, admit the two-celled heart 
of poetry with its expanding and contracting 
functions, — the centrifugal force of individ- 
ual genius, of invention, the centripetal force 
of the social group and its conventions, — and 
all difficulties disappear. The genius of the 
poet need not be referred to social forces; 
the functions of poetry noted as springing 
from the social group need no hypothesis of 
individual invention. We are now to put into 
sharper outline the neglected half of this du- 
alism, the social and communal part, the de- 
mocratic origins of p'oetry. 



DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 

In the course of Agamemnon's speech to the 
princes before Troy, Shakespeare puts into 
the king's mouth a series of palpable opposites, 
— the several antitheses of bold and coward, 
of wise and fool, of hard and soft, of " artist and 
unread." The opposite of the "artist," say of 
the educated man, the college man, is "the un- 
read." Here is a brave if very obvious text for 
sermons upon primitive and communal poetry 
as compared with poetry of the sophisticated 
days. For the tremendous moment in the history 
of literature, — and by literature is meant, of 
course, all aesthetic utterance since words ex- 
pressed and aroused human emotion, — the 
tremendous moment in this pushing and achiev- 
ing art was when the first reader got hold of a 
written poem, or other piece of verbal artistry, 
and carried it away to be read in solitude. 
The poet began now to make his verses for the 



DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 211 

artist, — in Shakespeare's sense, — for the 
man who would read. Previously he had made 
his verses for and along with the unread. 
Poetry, to be sure, was made by the unread 
and for the unread many a day afterwards ; 
but such verse ceased little by little to count 
as poetry, which dates for most critics only 
from the beginning of the age* of ink. This 
point, like Noah's flood, divides literature 
into its old world and its new world, not only, 
as the common explanation goes, because the 
poet's making now took a permanent shape, not 
because genius was made independent of the 
physical advantages of voice, tune, address, pre- 
sence, and magnetic influence over a listening 
throng, not only because composition became 
a deliberate and more artistic process, but be- 
cause the solitary, reflective, commenting writer 
could now appeal to the solitary, reflective 
and commenting reader. Bracketed these two 
now stand forever. We keep repeating Sainte- 
Beuve's phrase about the poet in his ivory 
tower ; but there are two ivory towers, and 
the reader's seclusion is as important in its 



212 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

way as the poet's own. It is clear that the 
reaction upon the working of poetry must 
have been immense, and more than enough 
to change certain characteristics of the art. 
It did not make simply for independence, but 
also for a far-reaching shift of method and 
purpose, that the poet no longer needed a good 
voice. Those who heard Tennyson read aloud 
his own poems, say the Morte (T Arthur and 
Maud, declare that they have a totally differ- 
ent appeal, seem different pieces, for the " fire 
and form " thus given them by their maker. 
Hazlitt was a lucky dog indeed to hear Cole- 
ridge "chant" his verse. And so the act of 
composition underwent radical changes in the 
ancient and time-hidden transfer from throng 
to solitude. Homo solus aut deus aut daemon. 
The really great poet could now be made as 
well as born ; criticism had its final word, and 
prevailed over the mere echo of applause. Ink 
and paper exactly reversed the result of the 
invention of gunpowder ; the single warrior, 
the man on horseback, the genius, was now 
lord of poetry, and the rank and file ceased 



DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 213 

to count. In a throng the poet felt, and sang 
or spoke; the throng heard, and was thrilled; 
but the poet did not think out his emotion or 
test it by its transfer to written words, and the 
thrill was common property of a hundred sym- 
pathetic but unreflecting hearts. Suppose one 
could only read great music oil the sheet, and 
never hear it from voice or instrument ! Not so 
evil is the case of poetry, but even here the 
unheard melody meant a loss ; and there were 
psychical changes also. With ample time to 
think and to compose slowly, to return upon 
his own thought or feeling, the poet formed 
that alliance between himself and his gentle 
reader which rests on the assumption that they 
two are the sole persons in existence capable 
at the moment of doing any thinking or pro- 
per feeling at all, and that the rest of mankind, 
the common herd, the gente ?no2itonniere, 
that rejected throng and congregate mind, 
are fools. Part of our liking for an insufferable 
man and master essayist, Hazlitt, who let slip 
that good word about Coleridge's recitation, 
is due, I think, to his persistent use of the 



214 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

confidential note, his scorn and impatience of 
every sentient being except his solitary, gentle 
reader and himself. The partnership in ques- 
tion, tentative at first, started all the growing 
mass of confidences, whispered as it were into 
the reader's ear, all the asides, explanations, 
comments, appeals, morals, which are found in 
narrative, and which now make the bulk of 
lyric poetry. And here too sprang up a sense 
of the pathetic at sight of the human mass, 
so unstable, so swayed by passion and blind 
instinct, so easily led by the charlatan: 
genus infelix humanum! How much of this 
alternate scorn and pity for the mass of men 
is due to individual disillusions, to indignation 
at fate itself, as expressed in the famous words 
of Swift, and how much is due to the confi- 
dential and superior note in literature, it would 
be hard to say ; but the noblest poetry has 
surely done much to foster both sorrow and 
contempt for humanity in bulk. Is it not likely, 
moreover, that only with this habit of solitary 
composition the poet began to take into ac- 
count the pathos of inanimate things, poured 



DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 215 

out his lachrymae rerum, and widened his in- 
terest, passing out of the social group into 
nature and the world ? Writers on the growth 
of naturgefuhl in poetry should heed this im- 
portant element in the case. Of course one 
is not always reading Vergil and Lucretius ; 
there is a mood for Dickens, for the comic 
paper; and the need of a world of men is cer- 
tain to supersede the scornful, the pathetic, 
the contemplative habit, — if only the solitary 
stops thinking and is moved to laugh, to sing, to 
suffer, to weep, to act, with his fellows of the 
throng. But before the period of the gentle 
reader, feeling and singing with the throng 
made literature; and one concludes that the 
literature so made differed from the modern 
not only in terms of record, but in terms of the 
process of makingand therefore of the product. 
The critic must take this difference into account 
before he makes his reckless assertion that the 
state of singer and intermittent hearers was 
not different from the state of writer and un- 
intermittent readers now, and that what seems 
a homogeneous mass and a choral voice at 



216 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

very long range, turns out to be heterogeneous, 
so many groups, so many individuals, a num- 
ber of single and discordant voices, when one 
views it all at close range. We transfer modern 
conditions to the past, and are prone to a 
profound distrust and contempt of the throng ; 
we want to single out this man or that man 
from the mass, and to have a look at the 
leader; the crowning literary achievement of 
our age is the interview ; and all that savours 
of the chorus has come to be unmeaning. 
Schlegel called opera the anarchy of the arts, 
and to us the most chaotic part of it is 
the stentorian comment or information of the 
chorus ; but the chorus of a Greek tragedy 
gives no such impression, though it is far 
more insistent than its counterpart in opera. 
Perhaps the old conditions of communal song 
can best be restored to the imagination if one 
remembers how self, along with single, per- 
sonal motives, along with individual thinking, 
disappeared when one went back to school 
after vacation, or sang Auld Lang Syne in 
close circle, with clasped hands and swinging 



DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 217 

arms, on class-day at college. Under such cir- 
cumstances the most individual of philosophers 
can be counted on for any lengths of com- 
munal folly. Psychologists have found in us 
all the subliminal savage, and perhaps they 
will one day evoke a subliminal primitive 
chorus from the hundredth year of humanity. 
Certainly it was out of a common and festal 
mood, not out of deliberation and personal 
efforts at a confidence, that primitive song 
arose. As, in his physical life, man was first 
dominated by his instincts, then through the 
medium of thought came into conscious hos- 
tility with some of these instincts and fought 
them down, — and just as custom is the un- 
conscious mandate of society, the consensus of 
individuals who feel, not think, pronounced 
by none but obeyed by all, while laws are at- 
tained through the consensus of thinking in- 
dividuals, — so, by analogy of evolution, one 
can divide the communal stage from the artistic 
stage of poetry. 

The mystery of invention is allowed on all 
sides; the poet still rules by divine right. 



218 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

But the democratic mystery of convention is 
scouted, and mere imitation of some one else 
is thought to explain that something-not-our- 
selves which makes for common action or ex- 
pression when our individuality is merged in 
the throng. Specifically, one refuses to know 
convention as the centripetal force in that 
old poetic process, which one ignores or, at 
best, undervalues, because of prejudice against 
the low intellectual levels of the mass. As 
to the ethnological argument that savages are 
wayward and capricious as children, and that 
unity, coherence, concerted effort, ought not 
to be ascribed to them, that objection answers 
itself. Because the primitive single man was 
so capricious, so much greater was the need 
of absolute surrender of individuality in the 
throng. No rhythm, all ethnologists agree, is 
so exact as the rhythm of the savages' choral 
and their dance. To primitive man the com- 
munity, as he imagined and tried to realize it, 
was in Tyndall's phrase the promise and po- 
tency of all social advance, his hope of pro- 
gress, the refuge of his baffled individuality. 



DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 219 

When a dozen men found out what they could 
do by pulling or pushing in mass, they found 
out the chief secret of civilization. By singing 
together, with all their steps timed to the com- 
mon rhythm, a social group seemed to hold at 
bay that tragedy which no individual could 
escape. This sense of kind, this instinct of 
union, coherence, sympathy, by whatever name 
the social faculty may go, this defiance of 
death and dissolution by the enduring com- 
munal body, is quite as mysterious and impor- 
tant as genius. One is fain to give it a home 
and the dignity of separate though humble 
lineage, and to bestow upon it a land, however 
barren and remote, from which it shall derive 
an independent title, and where it shall cherish 
a history and a sentiment all its own, a record 
all its own, of long endured battle with the 
foes of life. For there is always the threat to 
resolve convention into invention, to express 
the social faculty in terms of genius, and so 
to smother its identity and cancel its power 
by referring it to successive multiple imitations 
of the single initiative. But if the mind of an 



220 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

audience gets recognition as something differ- 
ent from any of the individual minds which 
make up the audience, and different from the 
totality of them, as something, moreover, to 
which the speaker appeals, it is not unreason- 
able to think of this collective mind as able, 
if only in a very rudimentary way, to exert a 
positive force which is not the same as individ- 
ual suggestion. Modern psychology gives play 
to such a power and reckons with it. Modern 
writers of the history of religion, like Professor 
Jevons, make not only mythology but religion 
itself, in early stages, " a product of the com- 
mon consciousness." The fate of democracy, 
in poetry at any rate, seems to hang upon the 
proof of this second, irreducible, communal 
force, this power which holds together, drives 
on together, lures on together, holds back and 
resists together; grant this, and one has the 
postulate of democracy in all its functions in 
the state, in the church, in the arts, in science* 
At rare occasions this power makes itself felt 
in such a way as to exclude the idea of ini- 
tiative and suggestion in any leader; he who 



DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 221 

seems to be the leader is really led, swept 
along by what one calls the spirit of the occa- 
sion. If this is no mere figure of speech, then 
the interaction and alternate preponderance 
of individual and collective forces can explain 
history, and can justify that cheer and hope 
of progress which is the foundation of demo- 
cratic faith. Man is made by nature, but 
society is made by man, and so whatever 
function we give to society is by second in- 
tentions ; but social forces must not be reduced 
to mere metaphor of the individual will. 

All this is theory, and must be backed by 
positive facts. Let us consider, for the ethno- 
logical evidence, two well observed and accu- 
rately reported social groups in their respective 
poetic functions ; and then, as direct evidence, 
two important survivals 1 of the older fashion 
of poetry. 

From the middle ages down to the present 
day, the remote and seldom visited people of 
the Faroe Isles have found their main diver- 

1 Used respectively by the present author in Beginnings of 
Poetry > 1901, and Old English Ballads, Introduction, 1894. 



222 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

sion, their literature, one may put it, in meet- 
ing as a solid community, by winter in a 
large hall, by summer in the open, and there 
dancing hand in hand, in a circle, to their 
own singing. 1 They sing traditional ballads, 
often a hundred stanzas in length, part home- 
made, part Danish in origin, full of verbal 
and material repetitions and long episodes, 
which in their turn are often repeated entire 
on the slightest excuse, with an inevitable 
chorus or refrain. These ballads abound in 
stereotyped phrases which apply to a given 
situation or event, are known by everybody, 
and so make the task of improvisation very 
light. Indeed, after one has struck out choral 
elements, repetitions, stereotyped phrases, 
there is very little left except the situation — 
it is this rather than story or plot — for what 
we call the invention of a poet ; and the situ- 
ation is not so often invented or borrowed as 
found, or even forced upon the throng. The 
dramatic instinct of the singing dancers is 

1 The latest book on the subject is Thuren, Folkesangen 
paa Far</>erne y Copenhagen, 1908. See especially pp. 24 ff. 



DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 223 

very keen. No detail of the action is omitted; 
and by voice, step, look, gesture, they show 
the situation, develop the story, and express 
their own common emotion. The music is 
made to fit word and step. They are at once 
actors and spectators, the movers and the 
moved in common emotion. Mostly they pre- 
fer the so-called chain dance, all holding 
hands and stepping in circles. But they evi- 
dently have episodes with freer play of ges- 
ture ; to the same movement, the same rhythm, 
— which is very exact, whatever the quality of 
the music may be in other respects, — clever 
members of the dancing throng improvise 
verses, full of iteration and leaning heavily on 
the choral refrain, upon some recent and 
" dramatic" event; and this little drama may 
be handed down as a traditional ballad, like 
the stealing of a girl by Frisian pirates, which 
is an old tradition of the islands. The people 
are said even now to make up ballads about 
the English and American trawlers, who come 
upon their fishing-grounds. A Danish priest, 
Lyngbye, nigh upon a hundred years ago, 



224 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

saw and heard mocking lays improvised by 
men in the throng, who pushed out the hero 
of a recent capsizing accident, and forced him 
to dance to their song about his own mishap. 
Such songs were often improvised, says the 
good priest, and, if well received, passed into 
the common stock and were duly called for 
at the communal dance. So that when Thuren, 
the latest to report these interesting matters, 
armed with his phonograph and pricked on 
by his emulous pride of search, speaks of 
such improvisation nowadays — all the other 
witnesses also make it prominent * — and says 2 
at the same time that only one of the Faroe 
dance-songs is of national stuff, celebrating 
the national hero, Sigmund Brestesen, it is 
clear that the scholar here limits his exclu- 
sion to ballads of the finished and epic class 
like those of the Scottish border or even the 
Robin Hood cycle. He does not count the im- 
provisations made up of repetition and choral 

1 So Annandale, The Faroes and Iceland, Oxford, 1905, 
whom Thuren does not cite. 

2 Work quoted, p. 27. 



DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 225 

and those stereotyped stanzas. These exclusions 
have wrought infinite damage in ballad-study. 
Editors of the early period had a trick, excus- 
able in their day, of leaving out many of the 
repetitions of balladry and what seemed cum- 
bersome and superfluous refrains. Counting 
thus, for his purposes, only the compact and 
traditional narrative ballads, Thuren goes on 
to note, as Professor Ker * noted before him, 
that the chief ballad material is from older 
Iceland and Norway. His next step is very 
obvious ; the ballad itself, like the material, 
he declares to be borrowed ; that is, the bal- 
lad as a poetic form, the ballad-habit, was im- 
ported to the islands from the continent. Part 
of this is true. Of course the material is bor- 
rowed. In that respect ballads are the de- 
pository of the world's ancient themes, — Hero 
and Leander, Orpheus, the adventures of 
the elder Becket in the east ; all the good 
stories are available. But the theme and stuff 
of these primitive little dance-songs can 
be home-made, as Thuren himself admits, as 

1 Epic and Romance, p. 324 f. 



226 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

Lyngbye so clearly stated, and as Hammers- 
haimb has proved by the text of his antho- 
logy. I should even challenge the fact of 
importation in The Girl Stolen by Pirates, 
a Faroe version, if version it may be called, 
of that ballad which is spread so remark- 
ably over Europe and which is so simple in 
its improvised and incremental structure that 
Professor Kittredge selected an American va- 
riant, The Hangman's Tree, l to prove com- 
munal or popular origins for the ballad itself. 
The dancers make two parties, — one for the 
pirates, the other for the girl and her friends. 
The pirates seize her; and in incremental re- 
petition of the primitive kind every one of her 
friends hears and rejects her appeals for res- 
cue, — that is, in this incipient little masque 
or play, not one of them will dance with her, 
— until her betrothed, in older times perhaps 
her brother, stakes life and all to save her, 
and of course dances with her the final verses 
of the song. As the " relative climax' 3 this 
sequence is a great favourite everywhere in 

1 See above, p. 193. 



DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 227 

balladry ; and it does not need the opening of 
a debtor's account with the classics, — say 
with the story of Adrnetus. 1 It seems to be a 
direct transcript from human experience. Does 
every idea come from some other brain ? 2 Sit- 
uations and stories are even more obvious in 
experience than ideas ; and these dances of 
clans and communities, of homogeneous folk 
everywhere, often reflect a passing incident 
where borrowing is out of the question. It 
would be pleasant to see the dance in which 
versatile James Boswell took part when he 
and Dr. Johnson were visiting one of the 
McDonalds at Armidale, where, in the even- 
ing, " the company danced as usual. We per- 

1 Euripides, Alcestis, trans. Way, 13 ff. — 

. . . imminent death Adrnetus should escape 
If he for ransom gave another life. 
To all he went, — all near and dear, — and asked 
Grey sire, the mother that had given him life ; 
But, save his wife, found none that would consent 
For him to die. . . . 

For the relative climax itself, see above, p. 188. 

2 Rabelais (in, 3) lets Panurge extol borrowing, then 
lending (4) ; while Pantagruel replies excellently (5). But 
the suggestion that thirst, as well as purse and wine, can be 
borrowed, does not occur even to Rabelais. 



228 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

formed, with much activity, a dance, which, I 
suppose, the emigration from Sky e has occa- 
sioned. They call it America. Each of the 
couples . . . successively whirls round in a 
circle, till all are in motion ; and the dance 
seems intended to show how emigration 
catches, till a whole neighborhood is set 
afloat." Professor Child, again, has observed 
that no theme is so constant in Scandinavian 
ballads as the forcing of the bower upon the 
strand; and history seems to say that no fact 
was more frequent. The Frisian pirate was 
once dreaded on the Faroes, as he was dreaded 
elsewhere: leave me not to pine in Frisia y 
cries the girl in the refrain. 

But let even this matter be borrowed, as 
conceivably the idea among children of playing 
house, or nursing a doll, has been borrowed at 
other times and places from inventive foreign 
youth; surely the dance, the game, the ex- 
actly timed singing, the acted event, the repe- 
titions, the universal aptitude for improvising 
verse, the common and insistent chorus or re- 
frain, make up an impregnable case of survival 



DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 229 

from the primitive art? Surely, as Professor 
Ridgeway points out, it is absurd to think 
that Dionysos or another introduced the art 
of dancing into Greece ; dancing is instinct- 
ive, universal, and this hand-jointed, circling 
throng would form spontaneously wherever 
men and women came together as a social group 
and in the festal mood. 

No, answers the trained scholar, with his 
phonograph, who is now in charge of these 
cases, here is simply degeneration, along with 
the factor of borrowing or transmission. It is 
a matter of literary bookkeeping; and one 
simply has to straighten out and sum up the 
very difficult accounts of medieval and later 
literature. The song-and-dance of the Faroe 
Islanders, so Thuren explains it, is a degener- 
ate or transmitted form of the old French 
carole of which one gets sights and echoes in 
Chaucer, in the Romaunt of the Rose, and 
even in more direct fashion. In a book, now 
very rare, 1 published in 1588, a Frenchman 
named JehanTabourot, who calls himself, — as 

1 Tkuren, pp. 45 ff. 



230 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

Voltaire did in later times, — by an anagram, 
Thoinot Arbeau, describes as an old man the 
dances which were popular in his youth. 1 One 
of these is the carole under a new name, 
branle, our English " brawl " ; and the author 
gives a "tabulature " of the whole affair, — 
the air, the steps, and the general directions. 
It is very like the chain-dance of the Faroes ; 
and thus, by Thuren's reckoning, the fact of 
importation seems to be established. For this 
fashion of dancing spread, as he points out, 
very rapidly over Europe. Latin nations prac- 
tised and loved it in the twelfth century ; and 
England was tripping it almost as soon. 
Shakespeare knew it as French, and his editors 
give the music, 2 while the " canary," they say, 
was a savage affair imported from the Canary 
Islands. The carole or " brawl" broke like a 
storm over Denmark and the north on the 

1 By this theory, dance-songs began with the upper classes 
and passed down to the peasants. But Suchier and Birch- 
Hirschfeld (Gesch. d.franzos. Litt., p. 11) declare that the 
facts point to a process directly the reverse. Folk-songs and 
folk-dance were taken up by the court. 

2 Love's Labour 's Lost, in, i, 9, 12. 



DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 231 

turn of the thirteenth century, and it came 
not long after to the Faroes, filling, doubtless, 
"a long felt want," and furnishing an outlet 
for instinctive emotion which has served these 
simple islanders for the six centuries that in- 
tervene. " Broke like a storm over Europe," 
saith mine author; "sped with raging haste." 
He is surely aware that in the seventh cen- 
tury precisely the same kind of dance, so far 
as one can determine it, was danced by the 
matrons and maids in France, who also com- 
posed a song to their own steps, a song in 
praise of contemporary persons and deeds. It 
is edifying to think of this imminent and 
swift-moving storm of fashion hanging over 
France for five centuries, an immobile and 
fearsome thing, and then, for purposes of its 
own, making a riotous tour of northern Europe. 
More marvellous, however, and almost a 
miracle, is the spread of this singing and 
dancing fashion in modern days to a remote 
and absolutely barbarous tribe of South-Amer- 
icans, who were until a few decades ago to- 
tally ignorant of white men and their customs, 



232 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

and who seemed to the misguided Teuton 
who discovered them and lived among them, 
trained ethnologist that he was, to be as near 
as might be to the state of unaccommodated 
man. Professor Wilamovitz-Mollendorff has 
protested against the citing of these savages 
and their very primitive verse as a help to 
the elucidation of a chorus of Euripides; but 
he would not object to their case, I think, as 
an astounding instance of the way in which 
a literary fashion can pass about the world to 
confound the sophists of balladry and make 
ancient wisdom more than uncouth. 

Low as they are in the social scale, the 
Botocudans find their main diversion in a dance 
which in all essentials is like the dance of the 
Faroe islanders. True, the steps are less diver- 
sified, the song is far more primitive, the re- 
frain is mere iteration, the improvisation less 
audacious, the tune less tuneful ; but, in re- 
venge, the links of the human chain are far 
more close, more effective, more symbolic of the 
spirit of the occasion. The Faroe folk simply 
hold hands. Each Botocudan lays an arm about 



DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 233 

the neck of each next neighbour in the ring. 
The proportion of chorus to improvisation is 
overwhelming ; and the latter art ventures 
only upon short summaries of the day's hunt- 
ing or describes some very simple situation. 
Yet it is essentially the same communal affair 
as the Faroe dance. And when broke this 
storm of importation over South America? 
When came this invasion of the French or 
other carole to the Botocudo? When and 
whence came it to almost every primitive so- 
cial group about which ethnology has made 
note, by direct evidence or easy inference, in 
all places and all times? 

Thought is free ; but it does not seem very 
wild to deny importation in this case as a su- 
perfluity of naughtiness, and to say something 
definite about poetry in the primitive throng 
as one can infer it from such wealth of con- 
gruent facts in regard to the elementary dance. 
Stunted or even degenerate as the Botocu- 
dans may be, and quite unavailable for de- 
termining the mental vigour and the keen 
sensibilities of those mounting races of men 



234 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

who first put poetry upon its way, nevertheless 
the conditions of Botocudan communal dance 
and song in all likelihood repeat the primitive 
conditions. Their close linking and their 
common rhythm achieved by marvellous con- 
sent of step, consent of voice, consent of feel- 
ing and thought, show the rude fashion of 
imagining a community by converting the 
concept of it and the yearning for it into ex- 
ternal acts, which, in turn, fortify and extend 
the concept itself. Here is our democratic 
idea in a very early state ; its mystery is a 
fit pendant to the mystery of the poet's inspir- 
ation. No one would dare to blot out the func- 
tion of the poet, or make him mere mouth- 
piece of his environment ; but it is to ennoble 
his function when one marks the progress of 
it from improvisation in the primitive choral 
throng up to the lonely splendours of the bard 
in meditation of his lay. And the survival is 
plain. The poet who makes verses by the 
most private act of composition, in that dream- 
state which Professor Stewart has described, 
never cuts loose from the conventions of his 



DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 235 

art; he has the throng always with him. 
They sustain his verse in the uninspired inter- 
vals which even with the noblest poets are so 
frequent and so long. The throb of his metre 
still echoes those ordered steps and voices ; 
and without the instinct of kind, the appeal 
to human sympathy, the survival of communal 
emotion, he would not compose a single stave. 
So, too, without the poet, however humble his 
initial efforts, poetry would never have gone 
beyond mere repetition of words and crude 
sympathy of emotion. He put himself, in 
the true democratic spirit, at the service of 
an idealized community, recognizing it as 
supreme, submitting his freedom to the higher 
order, but at the same time developing his 
art as he ennobled his own personal function. 
The poet is complement, and so a proof, of the 
community in verse. 

We turn now to a far higher function of 
poetry, and compare its workings in two com- 
munities more widely sundered in time and 
space than Botocudos and Faroe Islanders, 
but nearer in the stages of poetic evolu- 



236 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

tion. Among the ancient Hebrews, as in other 
places and times, women in festal dance sang 
alternating verses, which were probably com- 
posed then and there, and afterwards repeated 
at will, in honour of victory and as expression 
of the communal joy, or in ceremonies of the 
festal year. The children of Benjamin, by old 
Hebrew tradition, got their wives from the 
maidens of Shiloh, who came out to dance 
and to sing at the yearly feast in the vine- 
yards. The part played by women in these 
songs is significant. With such a lyric and 
choral greeting, Gothic women came to meet 
Attila after one of his victories ; and Scottish 
matrons and maidens are reported as making 
similar songs about the battle of Bannock- 
burn. Lowth pointed out that the victory of 
David was so chanted : one group of women 
sang a part of the refrain, — 

Saul hath slain his thousands, — 

the other group completing, — 

And David his tens of thousands. 

Men, of course, also composed these poems. 
Moses and the people " sang a song unto the 



DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 237 

Lord, saying, I will sing- unto the Lord/' — 
the "I' of course being congregational or 
choral; but it was Miriam who took the tim- 
brel in her hand, and all the women went out 
after her with timbrels and dances. And 
Miriam answered them — sang in alternation 
with their chorus — "Sing ye to the Lord." 
Professor Cook notes the Anglo-Saxon Exo- 
dus 1 where men and women sing alternately 
the "war song." But the splendid song of De- 
borah, so called, in the fifth chapter of Judges, 
while it still echoes the great choral verse, 
puts an artist and artistic poetry into the fore- 
ground. It begins, as ballads often begin, with 
an invocation to the people, bidding them lis- 
ten to the lay ; only the prayer, which comes 
at the end of ballads, is here a part of the in- 
vocation and is clearly choral. When a tribe 
of Israel is named, it is in the right communal 
fashion, just as the borderer personified Liddes- 
dale or Teviot ; " Eeuben " had " great search- 
ings of heart." The episodes of the song, 
such as the story of Jael and Sisera, point 

1 Vv. 567 f. See Cook's Christ, p. xli. 



238 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

to the old ballad of situations ; and the orig- 
inal doubtless had far greater mass in choral 
and refrain. It has been called the oldest 
poetry in the Bible; but competent scholars 
now date it long after such simple mat- 
ter as the Song of the Well and Lameeh's 
song to his wives. Ho we ver, it is very old, and 
it is evidently drawn from the popular foun- 
tains, just as all Hebrew poetry goes back to 
communal origins. 1 By Professor Moore's ad- 
mirable account, 2 this " triumphal ode " shows 
" very ancient poetical language/' in its form 
seems older than the song of Moses, and was 
originally made by a contemporary, 3 perhaps 
by a participant. This is inference ; in all like- 
lihood there were many triumphant songs 
made by the women in the different tribes over 
so famous a victory, actually composed in the 
dance to the timbrels and to loud choral of 

1 Budde, in the Preuss. Jahrb. for 1893 (lxxih) , p. 46. 

2 International Critical Commentary, " Judges," pp. 127 ff. 

3 The present ode is almost certainly not the composition 
of Deborah herself. The famous verse is now translated : 
" Till thou didst arise, O Deborah, till thou didst arise a ma- 
tron in Israel." 



DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 239 

the throng. Deborah, the mother, or matron, in 
Israel, sibyl and magistrate in one ; is a majes- 
tic figure seen dimly through the mists of tra- 
dition. She seems to have incited the warriors 
of God to their glorious warfare ; and it was 
fitting that this ode, a kind of poetical quint- 
essence of all the triumphal songs, should 
have been ascribed to her. We need not con- 
clude, however, that the warriors themselves 
were silent about their victory ; and Professor 
Moore's guess in regard to the poet as " a 
participant " is made likely, in part, by the 
case of British ballads of the border, where 
the songs and chorals of the dancing women 
may well have been helped by improvisation 
and recollection of feasting men. Bishop 
Leslie says explicitly that these fighting bor- 
derers, with whom he was contemporary, made 
their own songs about their own as well as 
their ancestors' forays and fights. It is inter- 
esting to compare two fine but not highly 
poetical ballads upon a memorable and disas- 
trous clash of Englishman and Scot, with the 
great ode which sings in full key of triumph 



240 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

the victory of Israel. There was little triumph 
for anybody after that same battle which is 
sung both as Otterburn and as The Cheviot; 
here one seems on the trail of funeral laments, 
memorials of the brave men who fell, along 
with wider lyrical comment upon the desper- 
ate fighting that took place. Chivalry, too, 
crosses the path with a note unfamiliar to the 
older poem. But in both cases there are the in- 
tense communal or national feeling, long tradi- 
tions, and a kind of precipitation of the poetic 
mist. If Deborah's song has less of the epic and 
communal form, it has more of the choral 
and refrain, and an immediate vision. It has 
incomparably the greater poetic power, con- 
centrating its force, looking both before and 
after, blending the early fear and the late tri- 
umph in a great organ-roll of praise, and let- 
ting heaven and earth strike hands for the 
victory. 

They fought from heaven ; the stars in their courses fought 

against Sisera. 
The river of Kishon swept them away, that ancient river, 

the river Kishon. . . . 



DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 241 

Otterburn and Cheviot, on the other hand, 
lacking the great note, better move the heart 
and stir the sense of the pathetic. In both old 
and new, elaboration by the poet is evident. 

Lord, when thou wentest out of Seir, 
When thou marchedst out of the field of Edom, 
The earth trembled and the heavens dropped, 1 
The clouds also dropped water. . . . 

The only touch of description in the Cheviot 
is likewise bound closely to the action of the 
poem : — 

The dryvars throrowe the woodes went 

For to reas the deer, 
Bomen byckarte upon the bent 

With ther browd aros clear. 
• Then the wyld thorowe the woodes went 

On every syde shear, 
Greahondes thorowe the grevis glent 

For to kill their deer. 

There is evidence of manipulation here; and 
the immediate ballad of 1388 was not what 
this has become. That attempt to bind two 
stanzas by rhyme, which runs through parts 
of both ballads, — which is new, — as well as 

1 Or " swayed." 



242 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

the remnant of alliteration, and a kind of par- 
allelism, — which are old, — lead the scholar 
into many paths of conjecture ; but behind 
all the changes and mistakes of minstrel, scribe, 
reciter, lies the old four-stress popular verse, 
exactly the same kind of verse which still 
throbs in Deborah's song, and which, accord- 
ing to Usener, is the typical verse of commu- 
nal poetry in all tongues. The superb ode, 
spontaneous, a work of genius, as Professor 
Moore calls it, tells of an actual battle; and 
so do the two Scottish ballads. In the diffi- 
cult twelfth verse of the Ode, 

Awake, awake, O Deborah ! 

Awake, awake, lift up the song! 

Awake, Barak, lead captive thy captives ! . . . 

" the poet," says Professor Moore, " sees the 
people of Jahweh marching to attack the foe, 
and breaks in with an apostrophe to the two 
leaders ; to Deborah, to fire the hearts of her 
countrymen by song, to Barak to make prison- 
ers the proud foemen." Deborah is thus con- 
ceived not, like Miriam, as making a song of 
the victory, but, prophetess and " judge " as 



DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 243 

she was, chanting to the actual warriors a song 
for the battle, like a Germanic Veleda when 
the great war-chorus rose, and Woden's spear 
was hurled at the foe as signal of onslaught. 
At a corresponding moment in Otterbum, be- 
fitting the homelier but fiery narrative style, 
it is the minstrels who are bidden by Percy to 
strike up the music of battle and the soldiers 
who are exhorted to play the man : — 

" Wherefore schote, archars, for my sake, 
And let scharpe arrows flee ; 
Minstrels, playe up for your waryson, 
And well quyt it schall bee. 

" Every man thynke on hys treue-love, 
And marke hym to the Trenite ; 
For to God I make myne avowe 

Thys day wyll I not flee. ..." 

The poet of the ode twice employs the power- 
ful figure of vision ; the humbler muse of the 
minstrel has her own effective method, using 
dialogue, progressive details, and personal de- 
scription at close range, instead of that hov- 
ering eagle-glance at great moments of the 
battle, the flight, and the enemy's anguish of 
defeat. The minstrel recites individual deeds 



244 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

of valour, mentions no cowards or stay-at- 
homes, as the Hebrew poet does, and gives 
heroic names over to everlasting gratitude of 
his countrymen ; but it is the stars in their 
courses that fight with Israel, and the ancient 
river of Kishon that sweeps away the foe; 
and, while the tribes are addressed as persons, 
all the deeds of individual valour are concen- 
trated in the one feat of Jael, wife of Heber 
the Kenite. Emerson, I think, praises the 
splendid onomatopoeia of the climax as un- 
surpassed in poetry : — 

At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down, 

At her feet he bowed, he fell, 

Where he bowed, there he fell down dead. 

Another splendid onomatopoeia, echoing the 
mad flight of Sisera's cavalry, is best rendered 
in Dr. E. G. King's translation : — 

Thei} were the horse-hoofs hammered 
By his galloping galloping racers. 

There is even designed alliteration now and 
again in the Hebrew ; the poet commands all 
the resources of his art. Our minstrel had 
probably a mass of this beginning-rhyme to 



DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 245 

work upon in the old refrains and improvisa- 
tions, but he is often too lavish with it, as in 
this picture : — 

The doughety Dogglas on a stede, 

He rode all his men beforne, 
His armor glytteryde as dyd a glede, 

A boldar barne was never born. 

No finer contrast could be made than to match 
the fierce Hebrew spirit of exultation at the 
sight of Kishon's torrent sweeping away the 
dead foemen of Israel, against the chivalry 
of Percy as he stands over Douglas slain, and 
speaks his words of regret and praise. 

The Persy leanyd on his brande 

And saw the Duglas de ; 
He took the dede mane by the hande, 

And sayd, " Wo ys me for the ! 

" To have savyde thy lyffe I wolde have partyd with 
My landes for years three, 
For a better man, of hart nor of hande, 
Was not in all the north contre." 

Poet and minstrel, moreover, it is interesting 
to note, alike find a triumphant conclusion in 
picturing the arrival of the news of the battle ; 
but the minstrel's way is very humble. As an 



246 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

Englishman, he makes Scottish King Jamie 
wring hands and wail over the death of Doug- 
las, while King Harry, in London, regretting 
the loss of Percy, hastens to add that he has 
a hundred more captains in England who are 
" as good as ever was he." In Otterburn the 
widows of the slain, " with weeping tears," 
fetch away their dead husbands on birch and 
hazel biers. No widow, but the mother of 
Sisera, — a significant touch of antiquity, — 
awaits her hero; and the taunting climax of 
the ode, with its sudden breaking off, is de- 
servedly praised as one of the triumphs of the 
poetry of all time. 

I have undertaken the foregoing comparison 
because it shows the function of poetry in one 
of its commonest phases, the celebration of a 
victory in war, making more or less memor- 
able verse by a contemporary and spontaneous 
process. This early verse is lost; but all the 
learned agree that in both cases it was the work 
of persons who in one way or another actu- 
ally took part in the fighting, or else wel- 
comed those who did take part. Impressive 



DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 247 

choral effects, and an adequate refrain such as 
one finds in so many psalms, — and in songs 
of the Hebrew prophets — as well as in oldest 
British ballads, have been lost in the process 
of transmission. In the Hebrew, this material, 
probably of no mean value at the outset, was 
elaborated by a poet into the triumphal ode 
which lies before us in the book of Judges, 
however parts of it are marred by omissions 
and by errors of the scribe. In the English 
case, two sterling ballads have been preserved, 
telling of the same persons and the same fight, 
but differing widely in details and atmosphere. 
Other versions survive ; and the less dignified 
Cheviot version, known as Chevy Chase, was 
once, by Addison's account, the favorite bal- 
lad of the English people. Nor should it be 
forgotten that a ballad of this fight, whether 
our Otterburn or Cheviot, or an earlier ver- 
sion of either, was the " old song" that moved 
the heart of Sir Philip Sidney u more than 
with a trumpet," and that a stanza of the 
Scottish traditional ballad was almost the last 
poetry upon the lips of Sir Walter Scott. Now, 



248 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

while the poet has vastly ennobled his matter, 
while the minstrels, in their varying degrees 
of taste and skill, have played havoc to some 
extent with the old communal song, in both 
cases there lies behind the recorders not only 
that source in the community, which we too 
vaguely call popular origins, but the mysteri- 
ous agency of popular tradition. Securus ju- 
dical orbis terrarum, Newman's famous test 
for theological truth, could be emended in a 
single word to indicate an essential element, 
and so a real criterion of poetry of the people, 
— the test of time and the verdict of success- 
ive generations. Securus judicat orbis anno- 
rum. And here too is a kind of mystery. 
The Faroe Islanders and the Botocudos showed 
the mystery of composition in a throng; the 
Ode and the two ballads bear witness to the 
mysterious, half -creative power of tradition. 

At the beginning of this lecture we con- 
sidered what may be called extension, the 
space element and the local conditions, in 
the making of poetry in days before the age 
of ink and the intensive composition of verse. 



DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 249 

Verse was once uttered by the living voice, 
was heard by the living ear, and was both 
suggested and supported by the choral chant- 
ing, the steps and gestures, the vital sympathy 
of the communal throng. Much of this impro- 
visation was as fugitive as daily talk is now, 
and passed with its occasion; and some of it 
was held fast as refrain, as part of the choral 
reserve ; but some again, filled by the right 
singer with memorable qualities, became per- 
manent, became literature, — and this was by 
grace of oral tradition. Oral tradition is now 
as unimportant as the nearly vanished habit 
of communal making and the chorus ; but it 
had its day of supreme and absolute import- 
ance. The democratic revival brought this 
power of tradition to light by reviving interest 
not only in savage song and ritual, depend- 
ent upon memory alone, but also in the tradi- 
tional songs and ballads of the unlettered 
peasantry of Europe. It became a test, a mark 
of authenticity. It takes front rank in the in- 
structions given by the French authorities to 
collectors of national folk-song. The ballads 



250 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

which Child and Grundtvig gathered for their 
respective peoples have been submitted to this 
test, and they bear witness to the most subtle, 
most fugitive and difficult, most haunting of 
all communal forces. But the scientific mind 
under influence of modern reaction is very 
sceptical, and asks definite questions; it asks 
whether this differencing quality of the tradi- 
tional ballad really exists, and again, granting 
its existence, if it really can exert such an 
efficient power as to create a separate species 
of poetry. Grundtvig, everybody knows, had 
two tests, — tradition, and also origin, — those 
communal and choral conditions which we 
have just defended. Child left the question of 
origin in abeyance; and even his views on the 
tests of a genuine traditional ballad have to 
be gathered both from his process of selection 
and from the obiter dicta of his special intro- 
ductions. 1 But there can be no question that 
our democratic idea, applied to this poetic 
problem, will insist upon taking the suffrages 
not only of the people but of the years. The 

1 Now well collected and noted by Dr. W. M. Hart. 



DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 251 

traditional poem is a fact, although now be- 
come a very rare fact; the slow wide sifting 
and gathering process, once common in litera- 
ture, should be no more of a mystery than the 
narrow but intense process of genius in mak- 
ing its immediate poem. Tradition, like com- 
munal making, is not merely haze, not lack 
of vision, not the excuse of a huntsman when 
he has lost his trail. It is the work of time 
upon such poetic material as is not fixed by 
any record. The choral and dramatic part of 
ballads, the repeated air, the incremental nar- 
rative, tell of a concerting throng; the vary- 
ing versions, the impersonal tone, the lack of 
sentiment and moral and reflection, the faded 
coloring and the uncertain date, tell of the 
work of time. It may be a definite event of 
which the ballad sings, but tradition gives 
each generation a kind of proprietary right in 
the fact, and sets up a standard of fidelity 
that belongs to legend and not to history. 

"Old men that knowen the ground well 
enough," observes the minstrel who chants 
about Cheviot, "call it the battle of Otter- 



252 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

burn"; and these two ballads, originally one, 
have not only taken widely sundered paths, 
but have wandered far from their communal 
beginnings. "The chronicle will not lie" is 
quite another phrase; it is an appeal to the 
books. But Shakespeare, in a famous passage, 
shows that he knew the real channels of 
balladry to be utterly remote from such in- 
fluences of the record. Those "spinsters" and 
those "knitters in the sun" of whom Orsino 
speaks, are the keepers of communal memory 
so far as songs and narrative ballads are con- 
cerned; but the matter does not end with 
them. Oral tradition, in days of the homoge- 
neous community from age to age, was wont 
to give a quality which no modern poet has 
yet really succeeded in mastering for his own 
verse. We have said that Scott's " Battle of 
Harlaw," sung by Elspeth in the Antiquary, 
almost satisfies all demands; and if "Tarn Lin " 
is by Burns, Burns, too, comes close to the 
ancient art. But no one tour de force can 
prove ballad mastery; and Burns and Scott 
would be the first to disclaim it. Moreover, 



DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 253 

tradition had its clogs as well as its wings. 
All literature once depended on what Ten 
Brink calls perpetual reproduction; and this 
dependence begat not only tremendous feats 
of memory but tremendous feats of degenera- 
tion, folly and mistake. Over and beyond all 
such doings, however, tradition had a sensitive, 
sympathetic influence, hostile to abuses, and 
an ennobling if not creative power. Oral tra- 
dition, say the great masters, Child and Grund- 
tvig, cleanses, purifies, betters a good ballad; 
begin to make this ballad ready for the 
" stalls,' ' the printed state, and degeneration 
of the most squalid sort sets in. 1 Herder, the 
pious founder, saw these virtues in oral tradi- 
tion ; it drops the paltry, he says, the ineffect- 
ual, the bad, and it adds the good, the beau- 
tiful, the true, — salutary work of time. Nor 
is " time" in this sense a mere figure of speech, 
as when we say that time has laid its magic 
finger on some building or landscape, and 

1 The classical instance of noble oral tradition crossed by 
degenerate interpretations and " stall " editing is the ballad 
of Bewick and Grahame. 



254 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

really mean that suns have bleached and rains 
have washed and frost has crumbled the walls, 
or that the things of waste and desolation 
have sprung up there as in Swinburne's " De- 
serted Garden." A poem made by the poets 
of the old community and handed over to 
communal memory is submitted to a process 
as different from mere individual changes 
and omission as the process of oral appeal to 
the mind of an audience differs from the pro- 
cess of written appeal to a solitary, thinking 
mind. Psychology recognizes one of these 
differences, and will come to recognize the 
other. 

As with communal origins, so too traditional 
record makes scant appeal to the critic ; the 
historian, however, cannot ignore such a 
function in its long course of ministries to 
man's need. For, if I may dare to use once 
more an illustration that has served so many 
incongruous themes, the community or public 
is an ocean to which a thousand thousand water- 
courses, of every degree of importance, of size, 
of purity, of length, of straight or tortuous 



DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 255 

line, bring their poetic tribute. Much of this 
tributary water is mere refluence of the ocean's 
own tides, overflow even; and much again be- 
longs to the short and shallow and nameless 
streams. But there are rivers of stately song 
which one delights in tracing to their ulti- 
mate sources in some spring on the forested 
mountain, whose secret lies below the granite, 
deep in the veins of the earth, — I could wish 
this true simile to be more convincing in its 
terms, — deep, that is, in the mystery of the 
poet's own thought and emotion. But it is 
quite certain that the clear waters of this 
spring come by whatever unseen agencies 
from the very ocean to which it sends them. 
To the poet belongs that mysterious process 
which makes poetry the lifegiving thing 
which it is, — his is the sweetness of it, the 
glory, the flash of wild water in long reach of 
cascades; his, too, the slow and stately and 
epic course of the great navigable rivers. But 
in the last analysis this social art is nought 
without its social origin ; and the wildest cat- 
aract of them all still remembers something 



256 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

of the ebb and flow of ocean tides and of 
those currents of communal sympathy which 
circle the globe. 

The late Samuel Butler, about whose books 
so many persons are now talking, made a 
kind of ancestral memory the source and the 
warrant of individuality. When we totally 
forget, we die. Fanciful as this may seem, 
philosophers have rung changes upon the 
general idea since man began to think about 
himself. The race itself seems to have such a 
continuity of tradition. It remembers its ages 
of misery, of struggle, of defiance, of hope, 
— again not simply through individual re- 
cords but in the communal mind, or at least 
through individual inheritance from a hun- 
dred lines of descent, — cumulative, the weight 
of ancestral suffering and desire about which 
Wordsworth tells in his " Tintern Abbey." In 
this mood one thinks of man as a kind of 
Gulliver, now assailed in his helplessness by 
the Lilliputian foes, the infinitesimal destruc- 
tive forces within, and now by the great ele- 
mental powers that surround him, and trample 



DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 257 

and beat him down. No picture is so dear as 
the solitary sufferer of all these ills, Prome- 
theus chained to his rock, defiant, cast down 
but not destroyed. There is, however, another 
picture, quite as pathetic, quite as true. It is 
of the early social group, the first human 
polity, the first attempt to face and to baffle 
all these foes by coherent and concerted en- 
deavor. And if such a picture takes the shape 
of a half-naked horde clinging close together, 
stepping, singing, feeling as one man, then 
surely what the picture loses in sublimity it 
will redeem by pathos. 



VI 

ALMA POESIS 

Hac sub mole jacent cineres atque ossa Joannis: 
Mens sedet ante Deum, meritis ornata laborum : 
Mortalis vitae genitor Boccaccius illi, 
Patria Certaldum, studium fuit alma poesis. 

Poetry and scholarship were fairly convert- 
ible terms in the days of Petrarch, and Dante 
counted no man a poet outside of Latin verse. 
Nevertheless it was the creative part of their 
humanism which these early humanists loved 
and in which they really lived; while their 
scorn for vernacular composition became 
more and more fictitious, a pose which hid 
genuine affection, after the style of those op- 
probrious epithets which so easily turn into 
names of endearment. Petrarch said he ought 
to destroy his Italian verse, would do so, in 
fact, if people had not already taken it out 
of his hands, and, one may add, into their 
hearts; but the verses were not destroyed. 



ALMA POESIS 259 

Dante knew well what he was doing with his 
Commedia. But it is particularly in Boccac- 
cio's epitaph, his own making, that one can 
hear not only the accent of passionate devo- 
tion to the cause of classical learning, but also 
the note of that deeper and implicit love for 
poetry, as of a child for its mother, which 
lurks in the only real adjective of the in- 
scription. " Underneath this mound lie the 
ashes and bones of Johannes ; his soul is with 
God, and his works follow him. His father in 
the flesh was Boccaccio; his native town was 
Certaldo ; the love, labour, consolation, of his 
life, was poetry." Studium fait ahnapoesis. 
I have not even translated the adjective, but 
have thrust it into a huddle of nouns; it 
means just that gentle ministry of cheer and 
hope and comfort which has been the best 
function of poetry in human life, a gift to man 
like the gifts of nature, as broad and general 
as the casing air, voicing his festal mood, and 
putting his sorrows into such large speech 
and music as to rob them of their meaner 
pain. Alma poesis, then, poetry as nursing 



260 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

mother of the arts rather than their queen, 
the gracious and familiar power which comes 
into almost every life, in whatever guise, to 
soothe, to stimulate, to console, singing not 
only childhood into slumber but old age into 
its everlasting sleep, poetry the universal 
human fact, and not the quintessence of a 
hundred pages or so locked up in libraries — 
what is the story of alma poesis in her deal- 
ings with the great concerns of humanity, in 
the making of myth and of religion, in ex- 
plaining, warning, comforting, heartening, in 
the tragic interpretation of existence ? What 
are her activities now ? How much of her old 
power has she lost ? 

At first sight, the science of mythology ap- 
pears to be a mere catalogue of beaten causes, 
with a minute, added by some modern com- 
mittee on the subject, reporting no progress. 
Perhaps Bacon's method, in his Wisdom of 
the Ancients, would be set down as most 
beaten of all these causes; but we shall pre- 
sently see it revived for the Germanic account 



ALMA POESIS 261 

by a capable modern scholar. After all, 
primitive man was quite as likely to hide his 
wisdom in a myth as to hide there his pas- 
sionate love of landscape ; and " the disease of 
language " — numina nomina — could help 
either case. The picture gallery which was 
marked " primitive myth " by scholars of a 
half -century ago and was so beloved by the 
public, is now closed; but under another sign 
it may yet delight the world with its dawn- 
maidens and its laughter of the wind-kissed 
sea, fugitive loves of the stars, arrows of 
the sun, and all drums and tramplings of the 
embattled gods of the sky. Spencer's revived 
euhemerism, again, and his ghost-theory are 
derided ; but even they will apply, in whole 
or in part, to cases of the culture-hero, and so 
explain the myth as rising quite within hu- 
manity, not brought across the border. No, 
the master errors of mythology have been, 
first, to confuse myth and cult, secondly to 
confuse early and late stages of both myth 
and poetry, and thirdly, to indulge that un- 
holy lust of finding some single starting- 



262 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

point for the making of all the myths and of 
giving far too wide a range for the specimens. 
As for the confusion of myth and cult, if we 
put aside for the nonce all anthropological 
myths, as they are called, and look only at the 
myths of literary tradition, we must allow 
them a very loose tether as regards actual 
religion and ritual. Lucretius, in his opening 
hundred verses, begins with a child's accept- 
ance of myth — alma Venus! — and ends 
with implacable defiance of religion. Such a 
literary myth must stand in connection with 
theology ; it is a statement about some super- 
natural person or event ; but it is not neces- 
sarily the offspring of religious rites, and it 
is hardly ever the parent of such a ceremony. 1 
The poetic myth is usually lacking in one im- 
portant element of the cult, the ethical ele- 
ment ; and in many cases it is without another 
element, which, for later phases of religious 
ceremonies at any rate, is of great importance, 
the element of emotion. Strip religion of its 

1 Ritual out of myth is rare ; but see Fowler, Roman Festi- 
vals, 1899, p. 49. 



ALMA POESIS 263 

ethics and its emotion, and what has one left ? 
Strip a poetic myth of its ethics and its emotion, 
and one has failed to mar its essential charac- 
ter. Late myth is a child of fancy. The early 
myth is a child of fear. In one of the sonnets 
on the River Duddon, 1 Wordsworth, thinking 
perhaps of an often quoted saying of Petronius, 
primos in orbe fecit deos timor, speaks of 
" Sacred Religion, mother of form and fear " ; 
and if we made prose of it by reading " daugh- 
ter of fear and mother of form," we should 
come yet closer to the true meaning of this 
commonplace of critics. But the late myth is no 
child of fear ; it is born of that old union be- 
tween inquisitiveness and imagination. Mod- 
ern men put these two asunder, giving one 
of them to science and the other to poetry; 
but the genuine myths were all born before 
that divorce was brought about. 

Now, by the nature of the case, such myths 
as come upon the record — the myths of lit- 
erature — are fairly sure to be of the late, 
refined, highly poetic type. The celestial char- 

1 xvui, " Seathwaite Chapel." 



264 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

acters concerned may be ancestral gods who 
go back to earliest times, but the story, the 
myth proper, is clearly the making of a poet 
who works the old fetish-lumps of stone into 
fair shape and groups them at his own will. 
To ask the meaning of such a myth is to seek, 
with certain commentators on Shakespeare, 
for the " moral" of each play as the motive 
and cause of its existence. It is folly to ask 
even what the poet had in mind to teach; 
what he had in memory to tell, and how his 
fancy shaped the material, are all that can be 
inferred. Let us take, for example, a late Ger- 
manic myth in Scandinavian form, and a now 
antiquated guess at its meaning. Idun, darling 
of the gods, has been beguiled by the mis- 
chievous Loki to hunt for apples in a grove 
far away from Asgard. Here she is seized by 
the giant Thiassi, who comes in the shape of 
an eagle, and bears her away to his home. The 
gods, deprived of Idun, all wax gray-haired 
and old ; Asgard is desolate. Loki undertakes 
to bring her back, provided he may have the 
falcon-robe of Freyja. With this he flies to 



ALMA POESIS 265 

the land of giants while Thiassi is out at sea, 
turns Idun into a nut, takes her in his claws, 
and speeds back to Asgard. Thiassi, returning 
and missing Idun, assumes his eagle-shape, and 
pursues them. The gods from their lofty burg 
watch the falcon close-pressed by the eagle, 
and they heap up light wood before Asgard. 
As the falcon flies into the burg, they set fire 
to their heap, and so burn the eagle's wing; 
sinking helplessly among them, he is killed, 
and Idun is restored. 

So runs the myth, and a very pretty little 
myth it is. But the critic, intent upon that 
wisdom of the ancients and the meaning of 
their legends, proceeds to interpret it. Uhland, 
in his admirable book, explains Thiassi as a 
storm-god, for winds are naturally to be re- 
presented as huge birds, and Idun as " the 
fresh summer-green of grass and leaf " ; the 
wind of autumn whirls away the leaves. Loki, 
the waning, decaying, treacherous element in 
nature, " betrays the summer-goddess to the 
winter-giant"; but the other gods force him 
to make good their loss. With the early 



266 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

breezes of spring, Loki must fly to giant land 
in search of her. Thiassi is properly on the 
sea in these equinoctial times. Loki brings 
back Idun, and how? In the shape of a nut. 
Chops and tomato-sauce, gentlemen ! This nut, 
says Uhland, means the seed, the kernel, out 
of which a dead plant-world will blossom forth 
again. 1 The gods light a fire, the heat of 
summer ; and in this fire the god of wintry 
storms very properly ends his life. 

Grace and lucidity are in Uhland's interpre- 
tation. Unfortunately, however, there are as 
many answers to these myth-riddles as there 
are bright guessers among the mythologists. 
Mannhardt sees in Idun a goddess of the cloud 
whose waters are the quickening and healing 
agency of nature. Her apples which she gath- 
ers, the nut in which she is carried, are sym- 
bols of life and life-giving power. Bragi, her 
husband, god of poesy, is the thunder, and 
aptly enough is mated with a cloud ; so the 
muses, Orpheus, Apollo, the music-loving cen- 

1 Mythus von Thor, p. 123. Mannhardt gives an erotic in- 
terpretation of this symbolism. 



ALMA POESIS 267 

taurs, and other song-deities, all owe their ori- 
gin to one of the celestial sounds, — to thun- 
der, wind, or rain. 1 This, too, has grace and 
lucidity ; it is plausible enough. Mannhardt 
will hear nothing of grass and leaves. With 
Kuhn, he is among the clouds of heaven, and 
is fain to drag most Germanic myths up after 
him. 2 Later, as we know, Mannhardt aban- 
doned some of these vivacious interpretations, 
and became leader of a sane movement in 
mythology. " I am very far," he writes to 
Mullenhoff, "from regarding with Kuhn, 
Schwartz, and Max Miiller ... all myths as 
psychical reflections of natural phenomena, 
still less as celestial (solar or meteoric) ; and 
I have learned 3 to value poetical and literary 
production as an essential factor in the form- 
ation of mythology" Still less, of course, 
would Mannhardt admit the allegory pure and 

1 Germanische Mythen, p. 195 f . 

2 He makes the Ladybug (Marienlcafer) a mythical hero- 
ine of sky and cloud, quoting in support the English rhyme : 
u Lady, Lady Landers Fly away to Flanders/' and approving 
Pott's etymology of Landers = Laundress ! 

8 Presumably from Mullenhoff. 



268 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

simple as primitive myth, nor think that men 
once made it as the Norse skalds came to see 
it, as something to condense in a riddle and 
to guess. But there is no lack of such exqui- 
site interpretations. A lay of the Edda 1 tells 
us that Idun in an evil time came to dwell in 
valleys and shadowy places beneath the tree 
Yggdrasill. It is a heavy season among the 
gods, dull, full of omens. Odin sends Heim- 
dall, Bragi and Loki down to Idun to ask her 
concerning fate ; but she will not answer. 
Heimdall and Loki return ; Bragi, god of 
song, stays with her; — and why? Because, 
says Uhlan d, we know that poets are most fain 
to sing in the spring-time ; and since the earth 
has ceased to blossom, song, grown dumb, 
lingers in exile by the withered green of 
summer. 2 

Surely, an exquisite solution ! Yet, are we 

i Hrafnagaldr Odins, Odin's Raven-Charm. Simrock, in a 
note to his translation of this lay (Edda, 30 ff. 368 ff.) agrees 
with Uhland's interpretation. 

2 Uhland, Thor, p. 128 f. He makes the interesting sug- 
gestion that in our Scottish ballad of Hind Etin (= Jotun), 
Margaret takes the place of Idun. 



ALMA POESIS 269 

dealing with a myth? The lay itself is admitted 
to be of comparatively recent origin ; and one 
scholar — Dietrich — has very shrewdly called 
it a " Machwerk spater Aftergelehrsamkeit," 
parlous state indeed. It is extremely obscure. 
An Icelander of the seventeenth century spent 
ten years upon it without understanding its 
meaning ; and for precisely that reason it is 
anybody's property so far as the interpretation 
goes. Yet thus we proceed through all this 
group of myths. Tyr, who goes with Thor to 
get that famous kettle for the god's banquet, 
is the son of Hymir, owner of the kettle, a 
giant grim and stark, and of a mother gentle, 
"all golden and white-browed." Tyr, says 
Uhland, typifies the bold man who is always 
at home in the land of terrors and dangers. 
" This fair, white mother who welcomes her 
son and offers him the strengthening draught, 
appears as the noble, ambitious Hero-Nature, 
whose offspring is Courage. She draws her 
son to the house of danger, makes him famil- 
iar there, and gives him strength." l If that 

i Uhland, Thor, p. 163. 



270 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

is myth, then The Faerie Queene is a myth. 
Thor marries Sif, the corn. Their daughter is 
Thrud, strength, " die Nahrkraf t die im Korne 
liegt." Thrud is promised to a dwarf; that is, 
the seedcorn is sown in the ground. But her 
father comes in the spring and rescues her, — 
Thor, with his warmth and fertilizing rains, 
— and the corn shows itself above the 
ground, a tender blade. 1 Let us turn to a 
Scottish " myth " of a somewhat similar char- 
acter. Some rustic named Burns has put it 
into verse and called it " John Barleycorn," 
and most of us know it. 

Leaving now all these myths to poetry in 
its artistic stage, one would like to know how 
the mythic fancy of primitive men began and 
how it came to its ruder poetic expression. 
Comparative studies and the judicious use 
of ethnological material have shown that folk- 
made myths of the prime were to modern 
notions brutal, were absurd, trivial, obscene, 
wholly extravagant, incredible. It is true that 
a Bushman's myth or a Central Australian 

1 Uhland, Thor, p. 81 ff. 



ALMA POESIS 271 

myth is not to be taken as exact type of 
the myth of primitive man; we do not judge 
our ancestors by the standard of these degen- 
erate or stunted descendants. 1 Nevertheless, 
the description must stand in terms of the cul- 
ture level. What, then, do we mean by these 
fierce, bustling adjectives of condemnation? 
We mean that earliest myths bear the mark of 
communal making, that they have not been 
refined by any process of reflection and fancy, 
by excision of the direct impression of things. 
They show no reflection at all in the individual 
sense; for earliest myth did not spring from 
record of solitary adventures, did not even 
spring from brutish individual comment such 
as Browning puts into the mouth of Caliban. 
Consider the formation of the earliest social 
group, and think how important were its 
formative elements of rhythm, concerted ac- 
tion, speech. The expression of a myth is 

1 In remote rural New England, groups of people exist 
bearing some of the finest old colonial names, but they are 
sunk in brutish and almost imbecile stagnation. Suppose we 
went about to illustrate from these people the ways and words 
of that old New England stock ! 



272 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

communicative, and presupposes the commun- 
ity; it must be largely spontaneous, a matter 
of the first-person-plural passing directly into 
chorus. A dialect of myth had to be created 
in the throng before individual explanations 
could be made after the fashion, which Scherer 
seemed to prefer, of a scientific lecture, with 
the horde squatted amiably about some dell, 
and the dignitaries attentive in front rows and 
favoured seats. . . . No, that will not do. 
Thinking about extraneous matters was a social 
process, for speech itself had surely a festal 
and social origin; and the earliest expression 
of such thought in terms of myth dealt with 
a society of gods organized after the fashion 
of human social groups. The anthropomorphic 
tendency is constant, and man divided divin- 
ity from humanity by a very thin partition ; 
but our zobn politikon naturally began with 
the group. Mr. Frazer's account 1 of the pass- 
ing of early magic seems inaccurate for this 
very reason. Man at first, he says, regarded 
himself as a kind of god, then thought his 

1 Golden Bough, i, 32, 39. 



ALMA POESIS 273 

god to be all men's god, and finally lost faith 
in magic with the perception that not even 
his god had power over natural forces. But 
this kind of primitive thinking seems out of 
the question; it is a Kant's Kritik. Early 
thinking about supernatural relations was not 
only vague; it was social. All primitive relig- 
ious rites, like all primitive poetry, were choral, 
the interest and the activity of a mass of men ; 
and when Comparetti l asserts not only that 
the myth of the origin of things was the be- 
ginning of poetry, an impossible idea, but 
that poetry arose together with myth after the 
period of magic was over, he leaves out of 
sight the initial importance of the social group. 
Progress was possible only by the impulse of 
the individual carrying the group with him ; 
but what the individual did for myth and 
poetry was in and of the group, communal. 
Magicians and magic are now credited, plaus- 
ibly, it seems, with an often anti-social func- 
tion. At any rate, survivals show the magician 
hiring out his services to gratify private hatred, 
1 Kalewala, German trans., pp. 268, 272, and often. 



274 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

personal malice and greed. Moreover, I think 
that the widespread idea of individual trans- 
formation, as in the werewolf myths, can be 
explained not only by the theory of man's 
close relationship with animals, but also by the 
sense of an individual and anti-social privilege, 
and of the harm which came to the social 
group from this double personality. Particularly 
the beast that takes man's shape would acquire 
such an unpopularity, and an element of the 
pathetic, the tragic, is a thought fathered by 
ancient social wish. The Neckan, and the for- 
saken Merman, are referred to the clash be- 
tween paganism and Christianity; but here is 
a plaintive little ballad from Shetland which 
gives a better though by no means a satis- 
factory glimpse of the old social myth. It is 
the familiar story of a husband from over the 
human border, in this case one of the " Finns " 
or ocean-dwellers who come to land, doff their 
seal-skins, and so may love and wed a mortal. 
The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry 1 has lyric 
possibilities and a conclusion worthy of Heine. 

1 Child, No. 113. Silkie= seQl. 



ALMA POESIS 275 

An earthly nourris sits and sings, 
And aye she sings, " Ba, lily wean ! 
Little ken I my bairnis father, 
Far less the land that he staps in." 

Then ane arose at her bed-fit, 
An a grumly guest I 'm sure was he : 
" Here am I, thy bairnis father, 
Although that I be not comelie. 

" I am a man, upo the Ian, 
An I am. a silkie in the sea ; 
And when I 'm far and far frae Ian, 
My dwelling is in Sule Skerrie." 

Now he has taen a purse of goud, 
And he has pat it upo her knee, 
Sayin, " Gie to me my little young son, 
An tak thee up thy nourris-fee. 

"An it sail come to pass on a simmer's day, 
When the sin shines het on evera stane, 
That I will tak my little young son, 
An teach him for to swim the faem. 

" An thu sail marry a proud gunner, 
An a proud gunner I 'm sure he '11 be, 
An the very first schot that ere he schoots, 
He '11 schoot baith my young son and me." 

The personal figures of this piece must not 
obscure its background of communal myth, 
and the personal note must not drown that 



276 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

old chorus of protest at the social intrusion. 
The individual artist of whatever art is born 
in and of the community, is its mere mouth- 
piece at first, and is never sundered from it. 
The priest, the leader of a Greek chorus in 
incipient tragedy, the soloist of a Botocudan 
choral, are one and all deputies of the com- 
munity itself; they detach themselves singly 
from the mass, either to drop back when the 
verse is sung, or else to remain as professional 
spokesmen. The singing is significant. Priests 
still intone a service. The man of magic sang 
his charm. For an analogy which may well 
bear upon far earlier stages, nothing is more 
striking than the chanting of the seidhmathr 
or seidhkona in old Norse sorcery, 1 whether 
in white or black magic, to raise the tempest 
or to avert some evil which hung over the 
community. Sorcerer or sorceress, from a high 
place in hall or in the open, sang what are called 
noble and even beautiful songs, — doubtless 
their primitive types were by no means beauti- 
ful or noble, — often accompanied by a chorus 

1 Saussaye, Religion of the Teutons, p. 389 f. 



ALMA POESIS 277 

of as many as thirty voices. Sibyl was a more 
dignified name for the woman who practised 
this art, uniting poetry and religion ; later she 
got into disrepute, and came even to be burnt 
as a witch; but in her prime she made Rome 
afraid of her prophetic powers, and sang for 
Scandinavia the downfall of her own ritual and 
creed. It is not too much to say that she can 
be followed back into the primitive choral 
throng. 

This relation is fundamental. While one 
gives scope to the poet, the seer, the priest, 
in endless reaches of development, one can 
never cut that last link of the chain which 
binds him to the chorus and to the ritual of 
the community. This chorus made for him his 
speech, made his rhythm, and set him first upon 
the utterance of communal feeling. In terms 
of communication the personality of the group 
would precede the individual personality; and 
this group-personality would be projected upon 
the "powers" which were influencing man's 
life before the individual personality would be 
attributed to a poetic natural force. It is per- 



278 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

haps possible to infer what the first confeder- 
acies of men felt about the confederacy of 
mainly hostile powers which surrounded them, 
powers more easily defied by a throng than 
by the single man, and how this feeling was 
expressed. The earliest shreds of myth were 
probably in the shape of a choral statement 
about the other powers, " We "against " They/' 
danced and sung by the closely united throng. 
With sacrifice and ritual, the same funda- 
mental fact still prevailed ; but many influences 
modified it. Explanation came from the clever 
man, and improvised narrative from the ready 
man. The emotional poetry of primitive myth 
lay in its expression of the sense of kind, so- 
cial sympathy, and a trust in something like 
an imagined community for refuge against 
the thousand personified threatenings of fate. 
Every ritual has this basis. Ceremony of what- 
ever kind is like the poetic art ; it also pre- 
supposes the social state and the means of 
communication. The earliest rites were more 
or less choral, with the man who knew how 
forging to the front as priest. The savages 



ALMA POESIS 279 

in almost all lands are still wont to dance 
their myth, to represent it by step and gesture 
in a kind of ballet. 1 Significant, as reflecting 
these human ways in early divinity, is the tra- 
dition, almost universal, of the dancing and 
singing of the gods. Creation itself is thus 
described in the majestic verse of Job, and 
the first of recorded sounds is a chorus. Who 
was it, asks the Almighty, who was it that 
laid the corner-stone of the foundations of the 
earth, 

When the morning-stars sang together, 
And all the sons of God shouted for joy ? 

" According to the common Hebrew view," 
says the editor, 2 the stars "are regarded as 
animated and closely associated with the an- 
gels." By late Celtic tradition, the fairies, who 
are residuary legatees of all the old pagan di- 
vinity, " delight chiefly in music and dancing, 
while instances are also mentioned of their ex- 
pressing themselves in verse and of their join- 
ing to sing stanzas of poetry in a sort of 

1 Wallaschek, Primitive Music, p. 198. 

2 Professor Peake. 



280 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

chorus." l Every ancient race tells something 
of this tale ; the gods and goddesses of ear- 
liest record are forever circling in the com- 
mon dance; and not until self -restrained poets 
took the word could there be question of those 
majestic figures sitting in council of state 
on Olympus. Pan and the nymphs, Bacchus 
and his crew, all the half-gods' world, ghosts, 
fairies, and even mortal witches, dance in 
their rounds until the dawn drives them to their 
own place. Indeed, of the many starting 
points of myth in song, the notion of a social 
group dancing and singing near some wall of 
rock which sent back a clear echo, is not to be 
condemned. 2 The powers outside of the com- 
munity — "They" — are also "shouting for 
joy," playing chorus and refrain to the song 
which " We " sing. And like love, they " dwell 
among the rocks." So the divine dance comes 
near to the human dance. 

There were wild, chaotic dances, too, which 
early man saw with wonder and fear, taking 
them into whatever form of myth he was 

1 Rhys, Celtic Heathendom^ p. 251. 2 Lucretius, iv, 580 if. 



ALMA POESIS 281 

ready to tell. The howling of all the winds of 
heaven in a summer storm, crash and rever- 
beration of the thunder, rhythmic noise of 
the rain, swaying and groaning of the trees, 
did not find him so indifferent as euhemerists 
think he must have been. He had good cause 
to infer some celestial revel ; all that pother 
had a meaning. The wild huntsman, with his 
rout, was not a mere leader of souls ; gods 
spake out of such a whirlwind. And then at last 
individual fancy asserted itself, and wrought 
the nobler myth. 

There was no single starting-point for 
myth. Environment had to play its part ; the 
bull-god of nomads, the date-palm of dwellers 
in fertile vales, were no convertible divinities. 
Tylor's axiom for all the range of primitive 
culture, which he took from Wilhelm von 
Humboldt, — " Man always connects on from 
what lies at hand," der Mensch knupft immer 
an Vorhandenes an> — is warrant for this 
backward look and inference. Certain myths, 
clearly scientific and didactic in purpose, which 
are preserved in poetry of historic date, sprang 



282 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

doubtless in the first instance out of the will 
to explain working along with the awe of be- 
lief. But this key will unlock only a few of 
the many mythological doors. Tribal grati- 
tude, such as Lucretius put into universal 
human terms in that fine passage at the open- 
ing of his fifth book, mingled with expres- 
sions of awe and with ritual hymns, raises 
into myth the culture-hero and his deeds; and 
this myth, in turn, can blend with human epic 
and its echoes of the funeral cry. In the right 
times Beowulf's barrow would have become 
Beowulf's temple; and while the theory of 
Miillenhoff cannot be applied outright to the 
epic as it lies before us, with Grendel as equi- 
noctial gales and Beowulf as god of spring 
and the conquering sun, nevertheless glimpses 
of the hero-myth can be obtained in terms of 
the epic material, and probably, too, glimpses 
of a myth of the seasons and the storm. For 
even in the mingling of the aesthetic with 
ritual awe, the democracy of those origins 
can be traced. The processions, the dramatic 
and symbolic performances which are found 



ALMA POESIS 283 

in survival throughout Europe, and in a kind 
of arrested development among sundry savage 
tribes, deal with the seasons in rotation of 
the festal year, and easily pass into expression 
of what we call the beauties of nature. Here 
the poet had his old material for myths of sun 
and of storm-cloud ; and that material, how- 
ever rude, was fashioned in the community 
and may be called a democratic gift. Across 
it run smirches and stains of what we now call 
the brutal, the silly, the obscene ; but over it 
all hovers the idea of a single power, not so 
much monotheism as the sense of what Cole- 
ridge termed the omnific, — of something 
solitary and ultimate, the primum mobile 
of all those divine spheres, not formulated 
in any belief, but felt in early stages of cult- 
ure, and expressed in such survivals as the 
fate to which Zeus himself must ignorantly 
bow, and as the mysterious Wyrd of Ger- 
manic heathendom. Now Wyrd, the sense 
of the omnific, the idea of God, are concep- 
tions which belong not to myth but to 
religion. 



284 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

What poetry has done for religion, what 
religion has done for poetry, are tremendous 
questions which touch our present concern 
only so far as the democracy of the process is 
involved. It is surely susceptible of proof that 
institutional religion came before personal 
piety, and that the great emotional and con- 
solatory utterances which spring from individ- 
ual experience could not be made until the 
community, in choral and ritual, formed its 
dialect of worship and supplication and praise. 
William James, in his Varieties of Religious 
Experience, takes account of nothing but the 
individual, To be sure, he says, fetichism and 
magic preceded inward piety, but they belong 
as much to science as to religion ; and he de- 
fines religion as "the feelings, acts and ex- 
periences of individual men in their solitude, 
so far as they apprehend themselves to stand 
in relation to whatever they consider the di- 
vine." That is the psychologist's way, and a 
very good way if one is regarding nothing 
but problems of the modern soul. Once more, 
however, I must protest against the half-truth, 



ALMA POESIS 285 

so often quoted from Professor Paul against 
social interpretations and explanations of lit- 
erature, that "all psychical processes come to 
their fulfillment in individual minds, and no- 
where else"; for this half-truth is sundered 
from the other half-truth, itself not to be used 
alone, that no psychical process can be uttered 
or put on record save by the purely social 
medium of communication ; and it is clear that 
these half-truths joined together form the only 
sound basis for any conclusions about reli- 
gious experience. The "man in his solitude" 
of William James's definition had already de- 
tached himself from the throng, from the com- 
munity, the point where religious experience 
really began. The communal basis is very clear 
in survival. Even now the average man is not a 
mystic, not even a subject for private revivals ; 
he wants to be helped, and to be steadied in his 
outlook, not rapt into a new world of experi- 
ence. For the ordinary personal experience 
of religion, one does not take to the woods 
or the desert ; one goes to church ; and this 
variety of religious experience, very sane, very 



286 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

human, is expressed by some familiar lines of 
poetry. Sweeter than any wedding-f east, says 
the Ancient Mariner, it is 

To walk together to the kirk 
With a goodly company ! — 

To walk together to the kirk, 

And all together pray, 

While each to his great Father bends, 

Old men, and babes, and loving friends, 

And youths and maidens gay. 

This sense of kind in religion, the communal 
faith and hope and love, can cool into merest 
habit, or turn to white heat in a public re- 
vival ; the poetry that voices it can be heartless 
doggerel, unmeaning chorus as vacant as sol- 
diers' songs on a march, or it can roll out in 
the covenanters' wild hymn, and in the surge 
and splendour of those Hebrew lyrics which 
mask the congregation behind the conventional 
first-person. Some of these songs were sung 
as a kind of march or choral in procession ; 
and the communal note is often very clear. 
Wellhausen even thinks 1 that the "I" in De- 

1 Moore, Judges, p. 138. 



ALMA POESIS 287 

borah's song means all Israel. That this con- 
gregational "I," also, like the "I" of a Greek 
chorus, is to be assumed in many of the Psalms, 
is everywhere conceded; and it is probable 
that the " I " of the prophets now and then 
conceals the concerted and choral singing of 
those bands which were an antecedent condi- 
tion and source of the solitary seer. His pas- 
sion of exhortation began in something very 
like a choral of the march. There can be little 
question that the triumphs of Hebrew verse, 
whether of prophet or of psalmist, are found 
in the poetry which springs out of the indi- 
vidual genius at closest range with communal 
and conventional resources, with the rhythm 
of trampling hosts, of swaying choral throngs, 
with the emotion of a multitude and its vi- 
brating sympathy. In the noble passages of 
Greek drama something of this majestic but 
communal religious verse is heard, even along 
with that note of passion for individual 
righteousness which would seem to be exclus- 
ive property of the solitary soul. We forget 
that if mobs can make individual men sink to 



288 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

unsuspected depths of folly and brutishness 
and crime, the sense of kind in a community 
or a throng can lift its members to unsuspected 
heights of thought and word. Tradition, too, 
that other communal force, turns the good 
social instinct into custom ; and custom is the 
mother of law. So the Greek chorus * sang its 
praise of that social order which Montesquieu 
came to set down as chief dream and object of 
democracy, soul of the ideal state, the spirit 
of the laws : — " that my lot might lead me 
in the path of holy innocence of thought and 
deed, the path which august laws ordain, 
laws which in the highest heaven had their 
birth, neither did the race of mortal man be- 
get them, nor shall oblivion ever put them to 
sleep ; the power of God is mighty in them, 
and groweth not old" — Do we not hear 
democracy at its best, voicing the noblest ideal 
of religion in noblest choral verse ? 2 

1 Oed. Tyr. } 864 ff. in Matthew Arnold's translation in his 
Literature and Dogma. 

3 See also the Vedas. Ethical elements came into religion, 
supplanting mere defensive ideas, as thought and reflection 
came into poetry, supplanting mere instinctive emotion. 



ALMA POESIS 289 

Religion, then, should inspire poetry every- 
where to its best and noblest expression. But 
this is precisely what religion very rarely does ; 
certainly not in modern verse. Germanic poetry 
seems to have been mainly choral in its early 
historic stage, about the time which Tacitus 
describes; but, although its first period of 
record, say in Anglo-Saxon, is almost wholly 
religious, the poetry by no means rose to the 
height of the great argument. To be sure, 
hardly anything but the religious poetry was 
preserved ; the rest is silence, save for a few 
epic and lyric echoes. Dr. Johnson, speaking 
about the hymns of Watts, said * of devotional 
poetry, that " the paucity of its topics en- 
forces perpetual repetition, and the sanctity 
of the matter rejects the ornaments of figura- 
tive diction"; and yet such reasons do not 
take us very far. The hymn covers only a 
small part of the field ; and while its fervour 
of phrase redeems now and then its lack of 
poetic merit, the scanty array of really poetic 
religious poems must be otherwise explained. 
1 Quoted in Hill's Boswell, in, p. 358. 



290 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

In the range of English sacred poetry, provided 
one counts only the purely religious pieces 
and excludes those lyrics of human tragedy or 
triumph which hold a religious element, there 
are scarcely a score of what one would allow 
to be really great poems. If the "best hun- 
dred" English poems could be agreed upon 
by competent critics, it is safe to say that less 
than five could count as " religious." And 
this is the case with all modern poetry, even 
— excluding a human document like the Corn- 
media — with medieval and transitional verse. 
On high levels, it is of course individual genius 
that sets the seal of greatness upon poetry, 
and intense personal feeling may produce 
verse that perfectly expresses the throng. The 
Dies Irae, so individual in its sentiment, — 

Quaerens me sedisti lassus, — 

Newman's Lead, Kindly Light , and Wesley's 
Jesus, Lover of my Soul, have all become 
congregational. Dante, of course, has the 
same fusion of personal and communal; only 
Dante voices an age, a system, the ideal of 
a millennium, and tells the adventures of a 



ALMA POESIS 291 

soul. Yet it remains true that in the wide 
range of letters, religious poetry is inadequate 
to its seeming opportunities. Why is there 
not the same quantity and quality in the 
account of religous emotion, say, as in the ac- 
count of the lover's emotion? 

Let no one ask me how it came to pass ! 
It seems that I am happy, that to me 
A livelier emerald twinkles in the grass, 
A purer sapphire melts into the sea. 

How common are these lyric confessions of 
the lover, and how few there are which tell 
of corresponding emotional states, in nobler 
mood, of the convert, the mystic, the saint! 
Goethe gives a touch of his own experience 
in Faust's reminiscence called out by the 
Easter bells ; but these great moments are set 
down for the most part in prose. Consider 
what the lyrical interpretation of such mo- 
ments might mean for poetry. Here is the 
settlement, by Christian formula, of two con- 
flicting claims : one is the assumption of a de- 
sign or rather of a conspiracy in the universe 
to save the Me, to eternize the most insigni- 



292 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

ficant, fugitive fact that science ever re- 
garded; the other is a denial of self for self's 
relief, the passionate spiritual suicide out of 
love for one's kind. Many a casus of this 
sort can be recalled from the confessions, 
meditations, dreams and agonies of the saint. 
Is there anything half so dynamic, so com- 
pelling, in the great conflicts of tragedy? 
And where is its transcript in great verse? 
Or, to put the case in other words, if the 
fusion of individual and communal impulse is 
alike the object of religion and the object of 
poetry, and if these two, poetry and religion, 
so clearly overlap, why is it that the greatest 
triumphs of poetry are not religious and that 
the greatest triumphs of religion are not 
poetical? 

It can be answered that religion is the 
affirmation of a miracle, the sublime contra- 
diction in terms, which asserts that we can 
and do know the unknowable. Antithetically, 
science plumes itself on the not too sublime 
truism that we can know only the knowable. 
Each has a kind of romance, savour, essence : 



ALMA POESIS 293 

in religion there is absolute faith of sufficient 
knowledge, and in science there is absolute 
resignation to insufficient knowledge. 1 But 
poetry, which is rooted in human sympathy, 
which springs from the communal instinct, 
which keeps in mind social ideals, and still 
echoes those ordered steps in its rhythm, will 
go to neither extreme. Goethe even called 
Paradise Lost a failure because it broke 
tether with purely human interests. So with 
science. Why, people keep saying, just as the 
good Dr. Aikin kept saying, why does not 
poetry kindle to its brightest flame at these 
great ideas and these tremendous facts of 
science ? Well, it does not. It does not go 
to that extreme, or to the other. It refuses to 
stay away from the windows of life and find 
its account in mere household furnishings, 

1 For a contrast, put Crashaw's Flaming Heart by the 
side of Seneca's famous lines with which Mr. Mackail ends 
his selection of Latin lyrics. These two express almost ade- 
quately the two extremes. There is greater sacred verse 
than the Flaming Heart ; but the scientific mood was never 
expressed in verse so well as in Seneca's single phrase, — 
. . . Lex est non poena perire. . . . 



294 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

however wonderful these may be. It also re- 
fuses to leave the society, the life activities, 
the tether of space and time, to which it was 
born. It borrows its moods from both its neigh- 
bours; from one it takes hope and joy, — "My 
heart leaps up! " — and from the other com- 
plaint, despair, — "Out, out, brief candle!" 
But it identifies itself neither with religion 
nor with science, essaying neither the height 
of one nor the range of the other. Lucretius 
himself is a great poet, not in terms of sci- 
ence but in the mood which it engenders, in 
those noble passages on death and on human 
futility. The same statement holds good of 
Tennyson in the In Memoriam. 

Poetry, then, takes its material from the 
things which are seen, and weaves the stuff 
of life into patterns of sorrow or of joy. In 
very broad generalization it may be said that 
the social group is the haunt of comedy, and 
that tragedy is the path of the solitary poet. 
In that very interesting Essay on Comedy, 
George Meredith thinks that its spirit hovers 



ALMA POESIS 295 

chiefly " over congregated men and women ; " ! 
and most of the ethnological evidence goes 
to show that the primitive social group had 
little or no commerce with the tragic muse. 
Savages, says Professor Bucher, had and have 
no tragedy ; while Professor King quotes from 
Aston's Shinto a capital example of com- 
munal joy on the subjective side. When a cer- 
tain procession arrives before the shrine with 
offerings "the village chief calls out in a 
loud voice, c According to our annual custom, 
let us laugh ! ' It must be borne in mind, 
however, that the primitive sense of humour 
is roused by precisely those means which now 
work for the tragic end, — by deformity, suf- 
fering, even the utmost anguish and pain. 
Death by violence was comic to the slain 
man's enemy and tragic to his friends. All 
the material for tragedy, of course, is present 

1 Essay, p. 14 f . See also p. 79, " Comedy is an interpreta- 
tion of the general mind " ; p. 84 : "a mind of man where 
minds of men are in working conjunction "; and that famous 
first chapter of The Egoist : the spirit born of our united 
social intelligence, "which is the comic spirit," See also the 
opening parts of Hobbes's Leviathan. 



296 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

in the primitive chorus; and we have seen how 
wide was the range and how diverse was the 
evolution of the choral lament. But the main 
concern of the communal and choral throng 
was festal, and festal was their poetic ritual. 
The desire for tragedy manifested by the sav- 
age tribes whom Wallaschek 1 has noted does 
not seem convincing in the face of so much 
evidence which has led to the sweeping con- 
clusion of Biicher that tragedy is foreign to 
early man. Moreover, the "fear and dread" 
which the Maori women attain by simulated 
weeping appears to be after all a comic and 
mocking affair. Less easy to explain is the 
overwhelming amount of tragedy in the pop- 
ular ballads, where I have counted, 2 so far as 
British material is concerned, out of three 
hundred and five individual ballads, a round 
hundred purely tragic, as against twenty with 
the happy ending, seventy for romance, sev- 
enty-five chronicle or epic ballads, — and some 
of these are tragic, ■ — and a handful of merely 



1 Primitive Music, p. 228 f. 

2 The Popular Ballad, p. 339. 



ALMA POESIS 297 

entertaining pieces. Now these hundred tragic 
ballads, most of them very old, outweigh in 
value all the rest. But no sane man claims a 
primitive character for the matter of balladry ; 
it is the form which goes back to choral begin- 
nings and improvisation in the throng. Tra- 
gedy, which mastered the ballad as it mastered 
all great verse, began with reflection, with 
thought, with comment of the individual soul 
upon human fate, with the sinister dower of 
personality; it noted the contrast of what 
happens to the individual and what happens 
to the world at large, to the social group, to 
the established order of things. Democracy is 
immortal; the king — that is, the state, the 
social group, the community — never dies. 
Only in a kind of echo does tragic poetry 
chant the fall of empire or the passing of a 
whole people, as in the fate of the Burgun- 
dians chronicled by hint and inference of the 
Nibelung Lay. The social groups consoled 
themselves for human tragedy, but did not 
reflect or comment upon it. Comedy in 
Greece sprang directly from popular improvi- 



298 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

sation ; but tragedy, in its right sense, came 
only when the choral wailings for the dead 
were reinforced by the personal lament, when 
that single actor began his half epic, half 
lyric dialogue with the chorus, and when the 
chorus took up its business of commenting on 
mortality. It is the single life that is tragic, 
and looks forward to an inevitable close in 
death. The whole universe conspires to baffle 
it, to mar and waste and overwhelm it ; and 
only the individual singer can cope with this 
individual fate. And only the individual poet, 
going back to the imagined community for his 
strength and his hope of a better issue, lean- 
ing on the communal sympathy and taking 
the communal rhythm, undertakes to just- 
ify the ways of God to man, eschewing, how- 
ever, that poetical justice, as one calls it, 
which is born of the democratic hope that the 
community will at last attain the perfection of 
justice and social order, rewarding all virtue 
and punishing all vice. That was the idea of 
Ezekiel, in his splendid eighteenth chapter, 
and it was the idea of Job's friends ; but Job, 



ALMA POESIS 299 

tragedy incarnate, takes his cause to the 
higher court. The modern instances are sug- 
gestive. Scott wished heartily to give his 
Bride of Lammermoor a happy ending, but 
his artistic sense was strong enough to resist 
the temptation. Dickens yielded, as every- 
body knows ; and the suture is very plain at 
the end of his best novel, Great Expectations, 
where he cut out his tragic summary and 
saved the lovers from what ought to have 
been inevitable fate. Thackeray's tremendous 
satire at the close of the Newcomes bids 
readers arrange matters to their taste; and 
Merimee makes an as-you-like-it ending of his 
Chronique du Regne de Charles IX. But 
the actual tragedies, the poems, never waver; 
and attempts to mend the futures of Lear and 
others of the Shakespearian group are a hiss- 
ing and a byword of criticism. The great 
poets, aristocrats of verse, always tend to 
tragedy ; and where they see the happy end- 
ing, the communal triumph, it is a consum- 
mation achieved by no democracy of the past. 
Now they turn to an imagined community 



300 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

where the inevitable personal wrong will be- 
come communal and social right ; that is 
Shakespeare's way, witness such assurances 
as his strong men give at the end of the 
tragedy : Montague and Capulet will hence- 
forth agree; Albany, with Edgar, can sustain 
" the gored state " ; and Fortinbras will rule 
Denmark wisely and well. Or, again, the poets 
turn to a longer range of compensation, sure 
but undefined, like the faith of Prometheus 
amid his agony. Or, finally, like St. Augus- 
tine, in his despair of earth, like Dante in his 
vision, they seek their democracy in the eter- 
nal recompense, fixing their gaze upon the 
City of God. And in this tragic verse, not 
in comedy, spring up the finest flowers of the 
art ; only upon the tragic triumph falls that 
glory of the high places of poetry, that au- 
thentic light of the poet's dream. 

Poetry has played a brave part in the life 
of man ; everywhere its function and its vital- 
ity have depended on the harmonious beating 
of its two-celled heart, contractile power of 



ALMA POESIS 301 

the democratic, conventional, choral, commu- 
nal, alternating with the expansive, energizing 
force of individual genius. At the present 
time, however, poetry is not only reported to 
be in very evil case, but is said to have been 
thus minished by one of its sources of strength, 
by democracy. 

When nations grow old, 

The Arts grow cold 

And Commerce settles on every tree, 

says William Blake in one of his quaint epi- 
grams ; and Blake was a democratic poet. 
Newman, 1 near the mid-century, makes more 
specific charges. " We have well nigh seen 
the end of English classics," he says. "This 
is not a day for great writers, but for good 
writing, and a great deal of it." Even Mill, 2 
in a letter recently published, declares that he 
has " long thought that the ultimate danger 
of democracy was intellectual stagnation " ; 
and in his famous book he had spoken of the 
same parlous state of " collective mediocrity." 

1 Idea of a University, p. 328. 

2 Letters, etc. i, 302 ; n, 87. 



302 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

Mr. Bryce cannot deny it of America, but, so 
far as creative power goes, will not lay the 
blame upon democratic institutions. The w r ind 
bloweth where it listeth. Lord Morley ! says 
that the real democrats of our day, English- 
men, Americans, Frenchmen, " would admit 
that outside of natural science and material 
arts, our lamp just now burns low." The au- 
thor of a clever little French book on the 
^Esthetics of Tradition, 2 published twenty 
years ago, gives such a magnificent obituary 
notice of the poetic art, and such a powerful 
arraignment of democracy as accomplice before 
the fact in the killing of poetry, that it is 
worth while to cite or quote a part of each. 
Democracy, says M. Blemont, makes social 
conditions unstable, breaks up the line of 
noble families, exalts the majority, worships 
money as chief good, cuts down leisure, de- 
stroys all ideals, levels the talents, produces 
mediocrity, and u adores general ideas." So 
poetry is destroyed. For proof, he tells how 

1 Misc. iv, 264. 

2 E. Bldmont, Esihetique de la Tradition, Paris, 1890. 



ALMA POESIS 303 

democratic France held its great exposition in 
1889, giving high place to all the triumphs of 
industry and the arts as represented by fact 
or symbol or inscription. Painting had its 
palace. Sculpture, too, was glorified, and 
America actually set up a Venus in pure 
chocolate. Architecture spread everywhere its 
pomp ; even history was typified by the hat 
which Napoleon wore at Waterloo — le cha- 
peau lamentable it is called, but unreason- 
ably; — and music filled the air. Under the 
central dome glittered in huge letters these 
four resuming words : Architecture, Painting, 
Sculpture, Music. That was all. Poetry, sov- 
ereign of thought, soul of all the arts, in this 
temple of the arts was nowhere, whether by 
deputy or by symbol, to be seen. Democratic 
France had turned her out of doors and left 
her to her fate. So far M. Blemont. Much 
more could be quoted in the lugubrious note ; 
but apart from the question whether demo- 
cratic days are sterile for poetry — certainly 
democratic France has fared better in the 
article of poets than imperial and absolute 



304: DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

Germany x — it is well to ask whether these are 
sterile days after all, whether poetry is really in 
evil case. At such close range one cannot really 
get the proportion of things ; but analogy 
of other times may be invoked. "How am I 
going to know/' the famous poisoner, Mme. 
de Brinvilliers, asked her confessor Pirot be- 
fore her torture and execution, " how am I 
going to know that I am in purgatory and 
not in hell ? " Pirot, says the narrative, " re- 
assured her " ; but one would like to have his 
words. How do we know that the age is poet- 
ically sterile and that the art of poetry is 
doomed ? May it not be only a purgatorial 
process that we have to endure ? What is any 
given " age " ? When did the sterility set in ? 
Did it include the making of Francis Thomp- 
son's Hound of Heaven f Why may not sterility 
simply mean the fallow season? And what 

1 The reaction against democracy, by Mr. Hobhouse's reck- 
oning, has been some twenty-five years in full force. But 
we are confessedly far worse off for poets than in democratic 
days. So the blame is shifted upon science. But is the fact of 
degeneration itself so sure ? 



ALMA POESIS 305 

age has not thought itself at the death-bed of 
poetry ? Their own particular times have 
always seemed hora novissima, tempora pes- 
sima, to the very ministers of the queen of 
the arts. Petrarch, in his famous letter to 
Homer, says it is a feeble, a " declining " day 
for poetry; and the guild of poets seems 
close upon dissolution. Again, just as Villon 
was putting fresh blood into verse, epic poetry, 
— and only epic could then count, — had died 
out in France ; l romance had gone to prose ; 
those vagabond songs, which really began a 
new poetic era, were thought to be the end of 
an art which might soon perish with its artist 
on the gibbet or in a wayside ditch. Or sup- 
pose that those songs had never come upon re- 
cord: hob ent sua fata libelli. But then came 
the great age of French poetry ; and that was 
mourned as the end. Texte quotes Fontanes, 
lamenting Racine : " tousles vers sont faits." 
Again, it is known that Drayton called Shake- 
peare's own day the " declining times n of 
" neglected poesy." The first of these adjec- 

1 G. Paris, Villon, p. 87 f. 



306 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

tives is a constant favourite, Byron, in his 
pamphlet against Bowles, tells his countrymen 
that they are in " the declining age of Eng- 
lish poetry." Now even this adjective is 
thought to be inadequate ; poetry is dead. And 
yet while we say this, we know it to be untrue. 
The function of poetry seems less active, less 
general, and even less important, than it has 
been ; but since many of us can remember the 
thrill of delight at reading a new poem from 
Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Swinburne, 
can remember when Enoch Arden was the 
"best seller," and when Whittier's Snow- 
Bound made the poet independent for life, 
even sterility, to speak nothing of death, is 
not a fit predicate for the state of the poetic 
art. It was only the other day that George 
Meredith died, and he held harder to his re- 
putation as poet than to his vogue as novelist. 
There must be breathing-spells. Clocks are 
not always striking an hour. Dante, indeed, 
in a very famous passage of the Purgatorio, 1 
thinks that close seasons of poetry, turbid and 

1 xi, 90 ff . 



ALMA POESIS 307 

heavy ages even, serve, when they occur, as a 
felicitous check to the working of that grim 
law of oblivion which mocks all human pro- 
mises of renown. A barren interval will thus 
keep green the recent poet's fame. Is this, 
then, one of the etati grosse ? Or is it another 
step downward in the long and inevitable 
descent of poetry ? 

Some facts can of course be affirmed. From 
the middle ages down to the present day there 
has been a steady gain in the use of prose, 
and in its quality, for an increasing number 
of literary efforts. Fiction is mastered by prose, 
copious, flexible prose, which adjusts itself so 
well to the mood of the times, and holds up a 
more exact if less magnifying mirror before 
the age. Prose is the dialect of journalism ; 
and literature is more and more journalistic. 
That is a long process. For this particular 
time, what one calls sentiment does not cry 
out as it did in verse and get popular response ; 
sentiment, like belief in progress, is a part of 
the democratic profession. Tennyson could 
not now sell sixty thousand copies of Enoch 



308 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

Arden within the year. He would hardly dare 
to publish Maud, nor would many of this 
audience dare to buy it, if it were published, 
and confess ownership of it at the club. In- 
stead of chronic rhythmical sentiment, we 
have acute but recurrent attacks in prose like 
Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, and all 
of that fiction which may be described as bil- 
lows of sentiment with an undertow of humour. 
Trilby, forgotten Trilby, was another case. 
Now humour, as everybody knows, is the re- 
turn of sentiment upon itself ; a priori, the 
times of reaction should show an enormous 
increase and refinement of humour ; and this 
is the case. For a while humour kept the old 
rhythmic trails, as with Calverley and Gilbert, 
and Lear got a deal of fun out of the antithe- 
sis by matching the cosmos of form with the 
chaos of thought ; but the best of the humour- 
ists took to prose. Perhaps the present brief 
period of our literature will come to be known 
as the age of excellent fooling. A further 
evidence of this erratic, cynical mood is the 
present estate of criticism. Just as criticism 



ALMA POESIS 309 

is getting stability as a science, it is losing all 
power as an art. Publishers now care very little 
for that elaborate review which in old days 
could utterly make or mar the fortunes of a 
book. I heard an excellent tale of a great 
Scottish critic who had just published a review 
of the definitive edition of Stevenson, and 
had prophesied immortality for the novelist 
and bard. " How long will Louie be read? ' 
asked a brother Scot at the club. "By the 
next generation?" "Nae, " replied the critic. 
If the rules do not count, nobody will mind 
the rules ; sensation is the thing. Again I must 
cite the case of the American author who 
wrote a novel without a woman in it and had 
it printed in red ink. Much of our magazine 
poetry is written in red ink ; and inquiries 
about its fate with the next generation are 
indiscreet. 

There is no doubt then that the conditions 
are now unfavourable to what the world has 
heretofore known as poetic production. The 
market is bad, the public is indifferent, that im- 
agined community is seen through the poetic 



310 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

glass very darkly indeed, and the great con- 
ventions of the art, rhythm and emotional 
sympathy, are treated with scant respect. But 
whosoever will call to mind how the romance 
some thirty years ago seemed utterly dead, 
and then, at the sound of Stevenson's trumpet, 
leaped to vigorous life again, will not despair 
of poetry in any of its functions. A phrase, 
Mr. Chesterton's I think, about Mr. Kipling 
recovering some of the "lost provinces of 
poetry " puts the case in cheering fashion. Now 
and again the function of poetry fails to 
express and to represent sundry emotions, 
thoughts, states of mind^public temper, to the 
liking of a particular generation or age. Some- 
times this function has no rival, and in conse- 
quence there is no expression, no literary ut- 
terance, of a whole range of human experience. 
So it was with the epic in those days of Fran- 
gois Villon. It is true that nobody now writes 
epic of any note, or even narrative of the freer 
sort, in verse; but something like William 
Morris's Earthly Paradise may be recovered, 
and where this stammers, another Chaucer may 



ALMA POESIS 311 

yet sing. The world may yet tire of prose 
fiction and go back to regular rhythm. 1 No 
" province " is thus permanently conquered. 
Or, again, the function of poetry may act 
nobly side by side with prose, as in the rivalry 
of Elizabethan drama and romance. But — 
and here is our own position — poetry may be 
felt to be inadequate to the task, and prose 
takes its place. Avoiding theory, avoiding any 
set scheme, one can look present facts in the 
face and become aware of a peculiar tendency, 
natural enough when the temper of the time 
is taken into account, to envisage a certain 
blankness in the outlook. Now misery does 
not really love company and verse ; it loves 
solitude and prose. Poetry rushes straight into 
the tragedy of things; countless steps ca- 
denced in absolute rhythm, and closed ranks 

1 Professor F. N. Scott has just edited for college stu- 
dents the essay of T. H. Green on " The Value and In- 
fluence of Works of Fiction n ; and it is, in the best sense of 
the phrase, a timely performance. When " The Art of The 
Leavenworth Case " is discussed in classes in English litera- 
ture, even the sturdiest believer in fiction — and all of us 
believe in its best — should take alarm. 



312 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

of common emotion, have thus marched after 
some bold individual leader, time out of mind, 
on the forlorn hope ; but this envisaging of 
blankness in the outlook is a solitary affair, 
followed by no choral of tragedy, and set down 
by the lonely writer in prose that is meant for 
a lonely reader. Men have been calling of late 
not for a stimulant in literature, but for a 
narcotic. That is the present fashion ; fifty 
years hence all may be rhythm and rhyme 
again, but just now, with the important excep- 
tion I am going to chronicle, it is prose. A 
stray sonnet, it is true, a bit of impressionist 
lyric, stray into this mood now and again ; 
but they are not felt to be adequate. More and 
more current is the so-called sketch, — no good 
term exists for it, — which shuns absolutely 
any regular rhythm, even what is called the 
marked rhythm of prose. Whitmanoid verse 
is powerless in the case, though here and there 
it is tried. This ostentatiously bald prose sketch 
sprang in a way from the short story, and is 
still very effective in that guise ; nothing is 
better as example than the magnificent futility 



ALMA POESIS 313 

of the first piece in Anatole France's Etui de 
Nacre, " Le Procurateur de Judee." A quar- 
ter-century ago some very powerful sketches 
of blankness were done by Alexander Kielland 1 
in a fine Norse gray ; notably the wrath of 
the old raven whose last refuge of barrenness 
is invaded by the silly, unmeaning march of 
human progress, and the visit of the fine lady 
to her deserving poor. The fashion spread 
fast. Out of a hundred good modern examples, 
Mr. Galsworthy's series called Motley 2 is 
particularly to be noted. The mood of these 
sketches is such as no one could possibly con- 
ceive in rhythm ; they displace the sonnet. They 
have the sincerity of emptiness. Contrast with 
them the full-blooded and audacious verse of 
Meredith's Modern Love, of Browning's rough 
optimism of tragedy in the Inn Album. Verse 
always indicates something worth while ; to 
get into step and to clasp hands, is so far ear- 
nest of some sort of enthusiasm. Even Swin- 
burne's invocations of sleep and death, which 

1 A few appeared in English translation. 

2 London, 1910. 



314 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

seemed so fascinating to the youth of forty 
years syne, had a genial and almost robust 
appeal ; their music, their gorgeous vacancies 
of thought which begat a compensating emo- 
tion, the swing and cadence of the strong Saxon 
words, swept us along as in some masque or 
festival in laud of Proserpine. It was demo- 
cratic, choral. Swinburne was a master of 
really choral effects in verse. 

Like fire are the notes of the trumpets that flash 
through the darkness of sound, — 

is only one line out of that sweeping, trampling 
chorus in Erechtheus which is a triumph of em- 
battled rhythm. More direct is this appeal : 

With chafe and change of surges chiming, 
The clashing channels rocked and rang 
Large music, wave to wild wave timing, 
And all the choral water sang. 

Swinburne was choral, indeed, even in his 
depressions. But the Tales of Mean Streets. 
are not choral; not any of the "cameos in 
prose." And what of the tales of mean lives? 
Democracy does not sing of mean lives ; but 
may sing with Mr. Hardy of the baffled lives ; 



ALMA POESIS 315 

and here we gain higher ground. Mr. Hardy is 
called an apostle of pessimism. But a study of 
his verse leads to quite other views and makes 
one see that those prose sketches are the voices 
of the solitary man, and that, as of old, the 
deeper mood of the time, of even the modern 
community, gets by whatever path its true ex- 
pression in verse. Does one call this an age of 
excellent fooling? Read Hardy's short poems, 
scattered in date of composition over the past 
thirty or forty years, and one forgets the 
phrase ; it is an age of infinite question, of 
pity, of indignation, even, but deeply sincere. 
Why should not the reaction against the two 
kinds of faith which democracy so strongly 
promoted, faith in humanity, faith in the good 
faith of the cosmos, have its pathetic voice of 
reaction? Here, as I think, in the darkest 
hour we begin to feel our way towards light, 
towards the dawn of another poetic age. 

Poet of the reaction is Mr. Hardy; none is 
so representative. His antithesis to Whitman 
is complete. His conventional, artistic disguise 
is perfect ; the reporter and the camera, whom 



316 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

the good gray poet so loved, are Mr. Hardy's 
abomination in verse as in life. He is scrupu- 
lously metrical, and while the rhythm is not 
facile, it is insistent, and calls out to be under- 
stood and held. 1 Emotion and rhythm fuse 
easily ; thought and rhythm find it harder to 
keep step, but Hardy makes them achieve 
the task. His verse is distinctly individual. 
Execution, technique, cadence of that vast 
poem, The Dynasts, are the poet's own ; 
strange at first for a kind of nakedness 
at which one balks, they become on fur- 
ther acquaintance a part of the pervad- 
ing imaginative appeal : the whole is greater 
than the sum of its parts. Whereas Whitman 
rarely thinks, always hopes, and gives mainly 
impressions, Hardy soaks his verse with 
thought, 2 and, for the mood, voices not pes- 

1 Except in Desperate "Remedies, an early novel, one finds 
no pathetic lapses into rhythm on the part of his prose. 
Says Miss Aldclyffe : 

To die unloved is more than I can bear. . . . 
... I loved your father, and I love him now. 

2 In the Athenaeum, March 26, 1910, he is noted as the 
only modern poet who really puts matter into poetry. 



ALMA POESIS 317 

simism so much as rebellion. He is the Luci- 
fer of Meredith's splendid sonnet, save that he 
refuses to see and to fear the stars in their 
courses as an " army of inevitable law." His 
minor poems achieve pathos by the same 
means, — rebellion, with occasional pity for 
omnipotence revealed as impotent. In auda- 
cious verse he offers a word of consolation to 
the bungling architect of the cosmos. 1 If 
Whitman thought to be the " great composite 
democratic individual," Mr. Hardy is the de- 
tached but perfectly representative individual 
of the reactionary age, putting the whole 
scheme of things to question. 2 One has the 
feeling, right or wrong as it may be, that he 
found his prose sketches, strong as they are 
in certain short Wessex tales, not really ade- 
quate to this envisaging and questioning of 

1 In milder mood he tells the pathos of an imperfect world, 
and how the Mother " unwittingly sets wounds on what she 
loves." Pity her, he tells us, as "she dares dead-reckoning on." 
He bears no grudge against nature, against the " subal- 
terns " as he calls them, — Cold, and Sickness, and Death. 

2 Inexorably. There is none of the " perhaps " of T. E. 
Brown's otherwise similar questionings, as in Aber Stations. 



318 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

time and chance. He took up the old rhythmic 
trumpet ; and his notes are bold. His minor 
poems, not to speak o£ the Dynasts , show how 
far behind we have left the crudely demo- 
cratic mood of George Eliot's " Choir Invisi- 
ble/'which is as transient a vocal and musical 
performance, Mr. Hardy would tell us, as that 
of his own beloved rustic choir led by William 
Dewy. Of the narrative and dramatic pieces 
there is little to remark save that ihej substi- 
tute verse for prose in comment on the human 
tragedy ; Life's Little Lronies become Time's 
Laughijig- Stocks. It is in what he calls his 
personative poems, where Mr. Hardy goes be- 
hind the tragic curtain and tries to deal with 
the manager, with the author of the play, 
that a far more subtile note is heard than in 
the famous Omar stanza, — sadness over "the 
mournful many-sidedness of things," sympathy 
with the great baffled will, 1 not indignation 
at the failure. Mr. Hardy, in a word, writes 
the poetic epilogue to that great chapter of 

1 See the group in Poems of the Past and the Present, end- 
ing with "By the Earth's Corpse." 



ALMA POESIS 319 

agnosticism which the nineteenth century be- 
gan in such cheerful and final confidence, and 
which now seems written to its despairing end. 
He sees that it has ended; man must hope; 
and here is the concession in the last stanza 
of a last poem : * — 

For in unwonted purlieus , far and nigh, 

At whiles or short or long, 

May be discerned a wrong 

Dying as of self-slaughter ; whereat I 

Do raise my voice in song. 

Better yet is " The Darkling Thrush/' to the 
bird which, on a dull winter evening, suddenly 
breaks into song: — 

So little cause for carollings 

Of such ecstatic sound 

Was written on terrestrial things 

Afar or nigh around, 

That I could think there trembled through 

His happy good-night air 

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew 

And I was unaware. 

In Mr. Hardy's verse, with all the discords, 
the lumbering and stumbling phrase, the un- 
happy trope, the tuneless line, broods a spirit 

1 In the same collection. 



320 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY 

which seems to express the thought and emo- 
tion of its age far more directly than In Me- 
7noriam expressed the early Victorian mood. 
It has that resolute, exploring tone which one 
always finds in poetry which is bent upon re- 
covering lost empire ; it has epic breadth, lyric 
power and directness, and it has the dramatic 
stuff, atmosphere, and perspective, sight and 
sound of deeds. When one thus works back 
from artistic suggestion to cumulative impres- 
sion, new life enters into one's poetry. But the 
exploring period comes soon to its end, mak- 
ing room for conquest and settlement; and one 
may confidently look for some surer triumphs. 
This period of reaction has its poetry ; but the 
mood and the art of it are not permanent. As 
romance not long ago leaped to life out of 
such a profound and death-like swoon, so the 
democratic note of enthusiasm and faith will 
sound again, when and how we cannot tell, but 
in its right season, and in the large utterance 
which hope always inspires. It is a pious wish 
that the poet who takes up that harp once more 
may be a democrat of this western world. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Admetus, story of, 227. 

Ai-en-Ise, 179/. 

Aikin, Doctor, on science and 
poetry, 105/., 293. 

Alliteration, 242, 244. 

Alma Poesis, 258, 260. 

Amabcean verse, 201, 236. 

Amos on the laments, 168. 

Annandale on Faroe songs, 224. 

Anthology, Greek, quoted, 178. 

Anti-social, bad in art, 36. 

Art, defined, 136, 143/, 146/ 

Artist, 195, 210, 276 : see Indi- 
vidual. 

Aryan, original, 62, 156. 

" Assistance," the, 194. 

Augustine, St., 28, 300. 

Babylon, ballad, 187/, 194. 

Bachofen on the masculine, 
141. 

Bacon, 75, 260. 

Bagehot, 65, 91. 

Ballads, 57, 102, 183, 222/, 
225 ff, 249 ff ; not primitive, 
297 ; and tragedy, 296. 

Barton, Sir A., ballad, 189/ 

Beowulf, 55, 282 ; quoted, 58/, 
173, 175/ 

Blake, 109, 111, 301 ; like Whit- 
man, 110. 

Bl^mont on democracy, 302/ 

Boccaccio, 259. 

Bonnie Earl of Murray, ballad, 
173, 194. 

Bonnie George Campbell, ballad, 
171. 

Border, ballads of the, 239^. 

Borrowing, 226/, 228 ff. 

Boswell on the dance, 227/. 



Botocudo, the, 231 Jf. 

Brandes, 97. 

Branle, ' ' brawl," see Carole. 

Brink, Ten, 82, 253. 

Brown, Doctor J., 89. 

Browning, R., 13, 313. 

Bryce, James, on democracy, 
14, 302 ; on progress, 71. 

Budde on dirge, 163/ ; on He- 
brew poetry, 238. 

Burlesque, 178. 

Burns, 98, 252. 

Butler, S., 256; his Way of All 
Flesh, 31. 

Byron, 98 ; on poetry, 306. 

Cante-fable, 186. 

Carole, the, 229/ 

Chaucer, 197, 229. 

Cheerier, A., 105/, 111 ; his In- 

vention, 106. 
Chesterton, 35/ 
Cheviot, Hunting of the, ballad, 

240^,251. ' 
Chevy Chase, ballad, 247. 
Child, Professor, 228, 250. 
Children, poetry of, 103/ 
Choral poetry, 158 /., 168, 177, 

183/, 193, 201, 216, 222/:, 

233, 238/, 276/ 
Christianity, 52/, 61. 
Cicero, 160. 
Climate, 133. 
Climax, 188, 193, 226. 
Coleridge and chemistry, 101, 

107 ; on communal religion, 

286 ; his democracy, 28 ; his 

Ode to France, 9, 13#. 
Collective imitation, 49. 
Comedy, 294/ ; origin of, 298. 



324 



INDEX 



Comitatus,the,52/. ; Saxon, 57/ 
Commonplace, 30^~. ; in poetry, 

SSff 
Communication, 271/., 277/., 285. 
Community, see Social group ; 

of emotion, 141. 
Community, the imagined, 17^. , 

Slff., 45, 54, 68, 83, 125, 218, 

235, 278, 298# ; not same as 

" public," 43. 
Comparative literature, 86. 
Confederacy, idea of, in science 

and art, 48/., 90; in myth, 278. 
Convention, 65, 126, 131^, 

140/, 144 ; a mystery, 218. 
Cook, Professor, 237. 
Coronach, see Dirge. 
Corson, Professor, on Whitman, 

116. 
Cosmopolitan literature, 86. 
Courthope on democratic poets, 

98. 
Crabbe, 100. 

" Cries," funeral, see Dirge. 
Criticism, 308/ 

Dance, 159, 172, 177, 184, 191, 
222 ff, 226/, 229, 231 #., 
238; in myth, 279/: 

Dante, 28, 78, 258, 290, 300, 
306/ 

Darwin, Erasmus, 101, 105. 

David's lament, 168. 

Deborah, Song of, 231 ff 

Defoe, 21. 

Democracy, constructive idea 
of, 16 ff, 20, 22, 28, 47, 72/, 
76, 90/, 137; credit of, 5; 
peril of , 38 ; reaction against, 
2, 16 ff, 20, 30, 36, 41 ff ; re- 
canting of, 8 ff, 17, 49 ff., 
63/; its effect upon poetry 
said to be bad, 301 Jf. 

Democracy and history, 69/, 
73 ; and myth, 283, and poe- 
try, 84/, 94/., 96 ff, 100/, 
143, 147, 210^., 218, 220, 235, 
250 ; and progress, 67/, 71 ; 



and religion, 288 ; and science, 

48 ff, 91#, 96, 107, 132 JF; 

and tragedy, 297. 
Democratic movement, Iff., 47, 

90, 94, 96, 130. 
Democratic vision, 38 ff., 129. 
De Quincey, 116. 
Description, 123 /., 241. 
Dickens, 299. 
Dirge, 157 ff., 160, 168/, 240, 

298; growth of, 161^; in 

myth, 177 ff. ; laws against, 

163. 
Donne, 35. 
Double standard in poetry, 

204/ 
Drama, 154, 182, 191, 195, 222/ 
Dunstan, 166/ 

Eliot, George, 92, 318. 
Emerson, R.W., on America, 7 ; 

on poetry, 206, 244. 
Enthusiasm, 4/ 
Epic, 154, 182, 184, 190, 195. 
Euhemerism, 261. 
Euripides, Suppliants, 159; AU 

cestis, 227. 
Exodus (Anglo-Saxon), quoted, 

237. 
Ezekiel on poetic justice, 298. 

Fabre on creative intelligence, 

92 ; on function, 152/ ; on 

instinct, 66/ 
Faguet, 36. 

Faroe Isles, songs of the, 221^. 
Faust, a democratic poem, 11/ 
Federalists, 18. 
Fetichism, 157, 272 / 
Fiction, 307, 311; Green on, 

311, note. 
Flaubert, 145. 

Four-stress verse universal, 242. 
France, Anatole, 93/, 313. 
Frazer, J. G., on magic, 272. 
Freedom, 15/, 20, 50, 73, 96, 

115, 126 ; trusted too far, 

23, 27. 



INDEX 



325 



Freeman, Germanic, 49 ff. 
Function, poetry as, 153/. 
Funeral, 151, 157 ff 

Galsworthy, J., Motley, 313. 
Genius (see Individual), 136, 

138/, 144, 147, 202 .#,219, 

290. 
Germanic poetry, 54 ^ ; diction 

of, 55/. 
Germans, early, 49/ 
Goethe, 5, 10 /., 14, 42, 109 /., 

117, 127, 291, 293. 
Goncourt, de, E., on Taine, 135. 
Gray, 89. 
Great Silkie (ballad), 193; 

quoted, 275. 
Greek chorus, 287/ 
Grundtvig on tradition, 250. 

Hamann, 78. 

Hangman's Tree, ballad, 193 ; 
226. 

Happy ending-, the, 299. 

Hardy, Thomas, 94; antitheti- 
cal to Whitman, 315/. ; poet 
of new period, 315 ff. 

Hart, W. M., Professor, 250. 

Hebrews, 39 ff. ; dirge among, 
163 ff, 169; myth of, 279; 
their poetry and songs, 236, 
287 ; parallelism in style, 
183 ; triumphal ode, 237 ^ 

Heine, 97. 

Heinzel on poetic style, 184. 

Hennequin, 134, 198. 

Herder, 75#, 83/., 102, 133, 
153, 253; his Stimmen, 76, 
78/, 114 ; defines poetry of 
the people, 80 ; founder of 
comparative literature, 86 ; 
influences on, 89. 

Hero and Leander, 190, 226. 

Hettner on literature, 149. 

History, 69 ; philosophy of, 75. 

Hobhouse, L. T., Democracy and 
Reaction, 13, 16, 18, 304. 

Homer, 2/, 85, 168. 



Horace on minor poets, 197/ 
Hugo, V., 28, 97/, 201. 

Humanity, 3, 11, 75, 87; the 

poet and, 214/. 
Hume, 4. 
Humour, 308/ 
Hymns, 289/. 

11 1," the, of Greek chorus, 287; 

of the Psalms, 40, 141, 286. 
Idun, myth of, 264/, 268. 
Imitation, collective, 49, 66, 

217/ 
Improvisation, 193, 201, 222^, 

233, 249, 297/ 
Indians of Brazil, 170. 
Individual (initiative), 49, 67, 

132, lSoff, 139,220; of the 

poet, 194, 202/, 212, 217, 234, 

290 ; in religion, 284/ ; in 

tragedy, 297. 
Instinct, 66/., 92. 
Invention, 65, 92, 132/!, 217/ 
Ishtar, Descent of, 179, 1 84 jf., 

187,191/ 

James, William, 91 ; on religion, 
284^. ; on Whitman, 126. 

Job, 298/ 

Johnson, Doctor, on hymns, 
289. 

Jones, Sir W., 108. 

Justice, 76 ff., 88/, 137 ; poetic, 
81/, 298. 

Kant, 75. 

Keats, 98. 

Kennings, 56/ 

Ker, Professor, 225. 

Kielland, A., 313. 

Kina, 163 ff. 

Kittredge, Professor, 193, 226. 

Landor, 98. 

Latin literature, influence of, 

52, 56, 60/ 
Laws, 25 ff., 29, 76 ff., 91/, 

107, 125, 132, 137. 



326 



INDEX 



Literature, defined, 136, 149 ; 

comparative, 86; modern, 

307. 
Locker on vers de sociiU, 199, 

201. 
Locksley Hall, the second, If, 

13. 
Longfellow, 198. 
Lowell, 7. 
Lowth, 117, 236. 
Lucretius, 97, 262, 282. 
Lyngbye on Faroe songs, 224. 
Lyric, 154/., 182, 195. 

Mackail, Professor, 151, 195. 
Magic, 273, 276 ; see Fetichism. 
Maldon, Battle of, poem, quoted, 

60. 
Manchester Academy, the, 101, 

105. 
Mannhardt, 266/. 
Marchen, 186. 
Mass-poetry, 54/ 
Memory and individuality, 256. 
Mercy compared with justice, 

77. 
Meredith, G., 122, 123 /., 294, 

306, 313. 
Menm^e. 299. 
Milieu, the, 134, 138. 
Mill, J. S., 9 ; on poetry, 208 ; 

on effect of democracy, 301 ; 

Representative Government, 13. 
Milton, 38, 120, 142; Lycidas, 

179, 183. 
Minor poets, 99, 197 ff 
Minstrels, 54/., 243, 245. 
Monism, 132/, 209. 
Montesquieu, 22, 26/, 70/, 75 ; 

founder of modern democracy, 

27, 93 ; his attitude towards 

law, 37, 91, 288 ; contrasted 

with Rousseau, 29/ ; Persian 

Letters quoted, 77. 
Moore, Professor, on Deborah's 

Song, 238/, 242. 
Morhof, pioneer in democratic 

criticism, 2. 



Morley, Lord, on democracy, 13, 
302. 

Mullenhoff, 54, 267, 282. 

Musset, de, 12. 

Mysticism, 285, 291. 

Myth, interpreting of, 265/ ; 
kinds of, 262 / ; origins of, 
263, 267, 270 ff., 281 ; and 
culture-hero, 282 ; and ritual, 
262. 

Mythology, 63 ; errors of, 261/ 

Napoleon, 77. 
Nature, feeling for, 215. 
Nero, a play, 199. 
Newman, Cardinal, 248. 

Ochlocracy, 128. 
" Omnific," the, 283. 
Opera, 216. 
Ossian, 116/ 

Otterburn, ballad, 240 ff, 251. 
Oxford Book of English Verse, 
99. 

Padelford, Professor, 167. 

Paradox, 30. 

Parallelismus Membrorum, 57, 

183/, 242. 
Pascal, 73. 
Peacock, 13, 208. 
People, 73, 76, 86/, 88 ; poetry 

of the, 59/, 84; sovereignty 

of the, 15/, 20, 73, 96, 99, 

115. 
Percy and the ballads, 84/, 

102/ 
Perry, Professor Bliss, on 

rhythm, 117/; on Whitman, 

110/ 
Petrarch, 258, 305.^ 
Poet (and see Individual), 134, 

138^ ; by divine right, 203/, 

255 ; and gentle reader, 213/ 
Poet and minstrel compared, 

243, 245. 
Poetic justice, 81/, 298 ff. 
Poetry, 9, 74, 18 ff, 96, 109, 124, 



INDEX 



327 



142, 150, 207 ; form of, 183/ ; 
oral delivery of, 212, 248 jf. ; 
origins of, 157, 182, 192, 217 ; 
study of, 152, 154; written 
and read, 210 ff., 213, 248; 
alleged decline of, 304 ff. ; 
prospects of, 320 ; and myth, 
200/: ; and politics, 6 ff, 
97 ; and religion, 284: ff, 289/, 
294 ; and science, 96/., 104/., 
107/, 292 ff; and tragedy, 
294/:, 311/ ; great poetry, 
139 #,204/ 

Poets for and against democracy, 
6ff. ; minor, 197 ff. 

Progress, 6S, 70, 91, 93; Mr. 
Bryce on, 71. 

Prose, fiction in, 307/, 311 ; 
poem in, 11.6 (see Rhythm) ; 
sketch in, 312 / ; not ade- 
quate to greatest demands, 
317. 

Psalms, "I" of, 40; quoted, 
140. 

Rankin, Professor, 55. 

Reaction, see Democracy. 

Reader, gentle, 210./, 213. 

Religion, 292/ ; see Poetry. 

Repetition, 183/.; 196; basis 
of epic, 186; incremental, 
187/, 189. 

Reuter, Fritz, 117. 

Revolution, French, 12, 45, 47, 
131. 

Rhys, Professor, 203, 279. 

Rhvthm, free, 109 /., Ill ff, 
116/, 119/:, 145; regular, 
109, 123,140/, 144/:, 153; 
on the Faroes, 223 ; among 
savages, 218 /., 234 ; as re- 
petition, 186 ; expressive of 
emotion or of thought, 316. 

Richter (Jean Paul), 117. 

Ridgeway, Professor, 151, 154, 
229 

Robin Hood ballads, 194, 224. 

Romans, 41/:, 129. 



Romantic school, 97, 100, 133. 

Rostand, E., 34. 

Rousseau, his democracy, 11, 
23/!, 51, 97; his disastrous 
influence, 20/:, 31/, 44, 77, 
81 ; his good influence, 20 ; 
origins of, 24, note ; compared 
with Montesquieu, 29/; with 
Whitman, 112, 125, 129 / ; 
and literature, 86, 109/, 1 17 ; 
and savages, 88/ ; his Nou- 
velle Helo'ise, 24 /. ; his Con- 
trot Social, 26. 

Ruskin, 90. 

Sainte-Beuve on Taine, 138 ; on 
poetry, 142, 211. 

Saintsburv, Professor, on the 
Grand Style, 206. 

Savages, 89, 101 ; without tra- 
gedy, 295. 

Saxo on the comitatus, 57. 

Scherer on comparative philol- 
ogy, 62 ; on myth, 272. 

Schlegel, A. W., 83 ; on opera, 
216. 

Science, 96, 104, 107 /., 112, 
292/ 

Scott, Professor F. N., on Whit- 
man's verse, 119. 

Scott, Sir Walter, 101, 247, 

^ 299. 

Sentimentalists, 87. 

Shaftesbury, 4. 

Shakespeare, 34/, 82, 160, 169, 
196, ,208, 210,, 300. 

Shaw, G.B., 30/: 

Shelley, 98, 143, 208. 

Sidney, 247. 

Sidonius Apollinaris, 94. 

Sievers, Professor, 166. 

Singing in magic, 276 ; in myth, 
279/ 

"Situation," the, beginning of 
drama, 191 / ; ballads of, 
192, 222, 238. 

Smith, Adam, 89, 101. 

Social group, the, 146, 158, 209, 



>4, 



n 



328 



INDEX 



218,221^,232#.,257,276/, 
293, 296 ; and the dirge, 174/ ; 
and myth, 271/, 280 ; and re- 
ligion, 284^1; and tragedy, 
297. 

Speech, democratic origin of, 
272. 

Spencer, H., 261. 

Sterne, 11, 87. 

Stewart, Professor J. A., on 
poetic genius, 141 ff., 144, 
234. 

Style of poetry, 195 ff. 

Swift, 4. 

Swinburne, 98, 114, 313/ 

Symonds, 41. 

Tabourot on dance, 229 ff. 

Taft, President, on laws, 18. 

Taine, 65, 95, 109, 150 ; his per- 
sonal attitude, 135/ ; his de- 
mocracy in science and art, 
131 ff; his method, 136, 
146 / ; his praise of justice, 
137 ; on the artist, 134 ; com- 
pared with Whitman, 131/ 

Taunt-songs, 164/, 175. 

Tennyson, 7/, 14/, 107, 212; 
his In Memoriam, 92, 108 ; on 
Whitman, 120. 

Texte, J., on Rousseau, 21, 86. 

Thackeray, 299. 

Thompson, Francis, 304. 

Thuren on songs of the Faroes, 
_222#, 229 # 

Times, the, 65. 

Tradition defined, 251 ff ; pop- 
ular, 248^. ; test of ballads, 
248. 

Tragedy, 82 /, 151, 154, 178, 
216, 294^., 311; in the bal- 
lads, 296. 

Transformation, 274/ 

Turgot, 68, 75, 88, 116/ 



Uhland on myth, 265^, 268/ 
Usener on popular verse, 242. 

Variation, 184, 196. 

Vergil's Georgics, 104. 

Versde soci^, 199 ff 

Vico, 2, 75. 

Villon, 305, 310. 

Vision, 38 ff ; civic, 43 ; poetic, 

142/, 234, 240, 243. 
Vocero, 160, 169, 171 ff, 181. 
Voltaire, 4/, 38, 74/, 86, 93. 

Wagner, R.. 110. 

Walpole, H., 3. 

Warren, Samuel, The Lily and 
the Bee, 118. 

Wendell, Professor, on Whit- 
man, 119. 

Wesley, 3. 

Whitman, Walt, 95, 106, 110; 
his catalogues, 123 ; whether 
poet of democracy, 111, 
113 ff, 128 ff ; spontaneity, 
113 ; verse, 116 ff, 312 ; like 
the sea, 115, 119; compared 
with Blake, 110 ; with Hardy, 
315/, 317; with Rousseau, 
112, 125, 129/ ; with Taine, 
131 / ; Democratic Vistas, 
128; Leaves of Grass, 114, 
116, 119#, 128. 

Whittier, 23. 

Widow, lament of, 170 ff., 
176. 

Women, poems sung by, 164, 
167, 168, 236/, 238, 277. 

Woodberry, Professor, on 
poetry, 143. 

Wordsworth, 10/, 14 ff ; his 
democracy, 28, 80 /., 100, 
115 ; Tintern Abbey, 256. 

Written poems, 210 j{f. 

Wyrd, 283. 



CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



OCT 18 «11 



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